Weekend Recap, Sprint 5, Steam Free Weekend

This last weekend we held a free weekend for the game via the Oculus Store, and we were also featured as a part of the Oculus Gold Rush event. This was a great opportunity for some new players to check out the game, and for us to connect with a wider audience.

Overall, I'm really pleased with the way that things went! We had more than 10,000 people download the game for the first time on the Oculus Store, and more than 3,500 people total participated during the one-hour Gold Rush event, peaking at nearly 2,000 concurrent players online at once! This was a huge leap over our previous concurrent record of just 350 players at once.

Overall, the servers held up well for the whole weekend, with concurrents of 400-500 regularly happening at peak times. During the hour-long Gold Rush event, we saw a massive influx of new players which stressed the servers quite a bit. We were forced to change the Tutorial instance from a single-person instance to a shared world, as the sheer number of instance processes we were attempting to spin up were causing some major server problems. After we did that, we were able to keep things online and players were able to talk and socialize during the event. After the event was over, the server load dropped back down to more reasonable levels and we were able to get things back to normal. We learned a lot about what types of issues are going to crop up once we hit the 1k+ concurrent mark. That said, I'm glad we were able to keep the servers online, give everyone their achievement, and hopefully provide at least a small taste of how great the overall OrbusVR community is.

Let's Do it Again This Weekend?

I'm pleased to announce that following the success of our Oculus Free Weekend, we're going to offer the same opportunity this weekend via Steam. Beginning Thursday afternoon, Steam users (including those with both Vive and Rift headsets) will have the opportunity to join us in OrbusVR and play the entire game for free for the whole weekend. We'll also offer the game for a limited-time discount during the weekend for those who try it and want to make their Orbus residency permanent.

We'll give more details on that as we get closer to the weekend, but we wanted to let everyone know in advance that it's coming up!

Sprint Five

In addition to all the excitement and craziness from this weekend, today we're launching the first part of our Sprint Five content, including improvements to the Fishing class, new rare fish to catch, and more. Check out the forum thread for all the details. The rest of Sprint Five, including the new World Boss, will be coming out later this week.

We'll also be officially announcing the time of the first OrbusVR Mage Tournament to be held this Saturday. So stay tuned!