Superhot VR (2016) just celebrated a big milestone. Having sold more than 800,000 units across all supported platforms, developers Superhot Team say the VR title has now generated more revenue than their original hit PC game Superhot (2016).

It’s no surprise the unique VR action game has done extremely well for itself. After all, Superhot VR ranked as the number three best-selling PSVR title of 2018 on the US PlayStation Store; on Steam, it was one of the top 12 best-selling VR games of the platform two years running.

Speaking to German VR publication MIXEDstudio co-founder and business director Tomasz Kaczmarczyk gave rare insight into the VR title’s success. To Kaczmarczyk, the number of Superhot VR copies sold has a strong correlation to overall headset sales, something he says has a lot to do with a largely unshakable best-sellers list across all platforms.

“We saw a huge uptick in our sales,” Kaczmarczyk said, referring to the 2018 holiday season. “There’s just more people that have headsets, and a lot of them will buy Superhot VR. It’s not anywhere near the patterns you see for regular [non-VR] games, where you see your sales decline over time and people start getting bored and they buy new stuff. For VR, if you’re in this “best-selling” list, your sales pattern is just about people buying headsets, and people buying your game.”

Kaczmarczyk tells MIXED that the game’s holiday 2018 uptick was partially due to the hype around successful VR rhythm game Beat Saber (2018), a title that’s cemented its meteoric success by selling over one million copies as of March across PSVR, Steam and the Oculus Store.

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Like many early entrants into consumer VR, the team wasn’t certain how Superhot VR would fare when they initially started development though.

“When we started out, my expectation for Superhot VR was that it was not going to be impactful at all, because VR was very very small basically at that point,” Kaczmarczyk tells MIXED. “We were making a game for devices that weren’t out and for market that was just hype; nobody really understood how it was going to get to multi-million numbers, to somewhere close to mass market. So my expectation was that it wasn’t going to do anything. But just like a few weeks ago, we actually crossed the threshold, and we’re now actually a legit VR studio because we made more money—we had more revenue with Superhot VR than the we had from Superhot.”

Image courtesy Superhot team

Although the studio says the VR sales have been encouraging, they still employ two production teams working on non-VR titles, one dedicated to creating the expansion to the original Superhot, and another for a non-VR game that should be announced this year.

“I hope that once we’ve got some of that shipped, or streamlined to a point where we can downsize the teams, we can start figuring out what will be next. I would like to work on something again in VR, and have a new VR project. [However] it’s not decided yet.”

Superhot VR’s next stop is Oculus Quest, where it will be a launch day title. Many of the long-reigning champions of the best-sellers lists are also making their way to Quest, including Job Simulator, Beat Saber, I Expect You to Die, Moss, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, OrbusVR: Reborn and more. We’ll be waiting patiently to see just how these ‘legacy’ titles fare on Oculus’ upcoming VR headset, one that promises to not only bring many of the games that ostensibly sold PC VR systems in the first place, but is doing it at a decidedly more consumer-oriented $400 price tag.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Mateusz Pawluczuk

    Sounds encouraging

  • οκ

    Summary: VR is not a quick profit for the developers but rather a long term investment

  • Adrian Meredith

    yet they still decided to do a the next superhot game without VR

    • kuhpunkt

      Doesn’t mean they won’t do another one.

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  • JesuSaveSouls

    I would like to see free movement locomotion inducted and incorporated.I realize with the quest you will be able to physically move around but it would be relative if in a seated stance too.Jesus God’s Son also died for you,He is alive !

    • Alexisms

      God’s son didn’t die for me. This deluded idiot died 2 thousand years before i was born. Just how arrogant do you have to be to say “I died for you” and mean it for all future generations. Can i ask he, and you, to politely fuck right off.

      • beestee

        I agree that this is not the time or place for such statements as the poster that you have responded to…but why even respond if you truly feel the way that you represent with your words? If it is meaningless to you, simply block him and be done with it.

        Since you engaged the discussion…

        The gist of it is that the first human pair made a choice to serve themselves over serving God. God allows the challenge to stand for a time to prove to humanity that it is not the best path for them, and at the same time as the rebellion God presents a means to pay the debt incurred by that first human pair. Enter Jesus, sent to Earth by God without knowledge of his own prior existence as God’s son to prove that a perfect human being could choose to obey God. Being the only perfect human to live on Earth since the first pair, his death was the payment required to negate the debt incurred by the first pair.

        Also of note is that every human that dies pays their own debt for their own rebellion in the same way. So what does Jesus death do for us right now? It opens the way for us to have a relationship with God and a more fulfilling way of life before the rebellion is brought to an end.

        • potato

          this place is for a vr game like

          what

  • Jistuce

    The original PC version was actually free, developed as part of a game jam(they now refer to it as the prototype). https://superhotgame.com/play-prototype/

    The expanded commercial PC version cost money.