According to developer Vertigo Games, around one in ten VR players owns a copy of Arizona Sunshine.
Marketing Director Kimara Rouwit said as much to MCV in a recent interview. “When we launched Arizona Sunshine, back in 2016, we hoped that it would become the game that it is now,” Rouwit explained, “most recently, the numbers are around one in every ten VR players owns a copy of Arizona Sunshine.”
This is a pretty extraordinary figure, even for a game like Arizona that saw success out of the gates when it launched on PC VR headsets in 2016. It’s a first-person shooter (FPS) set in a post-apocalyptic world in which zombies have overrun humanity. Unlike most of its competitors, Arizona Sunshine offered a full single-player campaign and multiplayer options whilst making full use of 6DOF tracking. The game generated $1.4 million in revenue in its first month of sales and won our first ever Game of the Year award.
Since then, Arizona has enjoyed ports to PSVR and, much more recently, Oculus Quest, along with multiple DLC expansions and arcade iterations. That post-launch support hadn’t been planned from the start according to Rouwit: “So that was like the dream. But realistically, that wasn’t what we had expected. we didn’t expect this amount of success. So, to be honest, we didn’t really plan for a service model with Arizona Sunshine, because nobody knew how big the player base was that you might be servicing.”
Vertigo Games is no doubt hoping to see similar success with its next big VR game, After The Fall, a cooperative shooter not too far off from Arizona’s foundations. The game’s been MIA throughout 2020 and was recently delayed to 2021. Vertigo itself was recently acquired by Koch Media, and continues to work on VR projects including publishing upcoming titles like Traffic Jams.
