After the first presentation to our investor from America, we had to promptly change the previous location to an abandoned factory. This decision was driven by the fact that by that time, there were several incidents of shooting in some USA schools. But we even did not consider these nuances at the design stage.

In November 2018, we realized that by the 1st of January, we would not be able to provide the final version of our game. But fortunately, the buyer from the United States was not hurrying to open, while the buyer from Novosibirsk could not find suitable premises to host the VR arena so our release was delayed until March.

In early 2019, thanks to the efforts of our marketing experts and sales managers, potential buyers started coming to us. During the demonstrations, our product fell to pieces before our very eyes: avatars did not match the height of the players, zombies got stuck in boxes, players failed to hear each other in the game, or helmets could suddenly turn off, leaving the player in complete darkness.

But despite all the shortcomings and backlogs, our game brought a lot of positive emotions, which greatly compensated temporary omissions and problems.

In the video below, you will see a kinematic model of a zombie that abruptly went out of control:

Our first promo video was made with all the faults imaginable: the game was constantly freezing; the avatars were squirming as if in a seizure because of the ever-glitchy trackers on arms and legs, and two players had to settle for school backpacks instead of the high-tech MSI VR Ready backpacks PCs.

Nevertheless, eight long months of development did not pass in vain, and this is what we finally managed to get:

A comprehensive system for managing the game, controlling the equipment (such as the computers’ and vests’ battery level and vests and status of trackers on a player), as well as calling the functions of third-party software (rebooting of a PC and components from HTC).

Full-body tracking responsible for the synchronization of the player’s movements and their avatar in the game.

Mechanisms for calibrating an avatar to fit a specific person as well as six different avatars.

A fully-ready game Safe Night lasting 30–40 minutes with three difficulty levels translated into two languages.

A license system that prevents the launch of games without a license key and records the duration of each running game session.

Our first VR arena

In March 2019, the space for the arena in Novosibirsk was ready as surely as our product. At least, we thought so.

Due to the arena being located in a shopping mall, there was a lot of interference in the 2.4 GHz band, which happens to be around the frequency that HTC trackers use. During the game, the limbs of the players constantly twitched and flew in different directions.

But from the players’ point of view, the whole extravaganza was pretty funny, and they kept laughing because of ridiculous acrobatics their avatars were performing, such as “Haha, Danila, what a nice leg-split, can you do the same in reality?”. But from our point of view, it was a complete failure. While working in a comfortable office where everyone uses 5 GHz, we could not even imagine that we would face such a problem.

We could not influence the level of interference in these premises, so we decided to utilize some workarounds. First, we changed the assembly diagram of computers at the hardware level to reduce the distance between the tracker and the receiver, which improved the signal quality.

Then we added the detection of failures in the work of trackers to the game logic, for instance, when a leg suddenly appears three meters away from the virtual body. Once a failure was identified, the system ceased to register the data from the tracker and rendered the defective limb of the avatar in a neutral position.

After a couple of sleepless nights, this feature was finally ready. It saved us at conferences several times already, while competitors had problems with launching because of frequency interference.

After settling the issue of frequency interference, we suddenly encountered a non-technical problem. The players could not hear the administrator’s commands (for example, do not leave the playing area, do not run backward, and other standard rules of conduct).

But players should not be blamed for this because in emotionally tense situations every person cannot help but focus all their attention on a source of danger, and in our case, the source of danger were zombies, but not strange sounds coming from the headphones. Another couple of sleepless nights were spent on the integration of the “Pause” and “Kill all the zombies around” buttons for the administrators.

As a result in the middle of spring 2019 we opened our first VR arena with full immersion.

Our first VR playing arena in Novosibirsk

Since it was our first experience of selling the game franchise, and the process of attracting visitors had not yet been polished, we devoted ourselves to advertising and promoting our arena together with the franchisees. So now we have a dedicated marketer for the future and already existing VR platforms who works with the following channels:

SMM as the main channel.

PPC advertising in Yandex and Google search engines.

Different landings: from holding corporative events to romantic dates with a loved one.

Arranging tournaments, competitions, and giveaways.

Special offers and discounts.

Sales

A year after we got started, we finally began to sell not beautiful pictures and sound promises, but a ready-for-launch franchise through the example of the work platform that made money on our product. The sales team was highly motivated, while the technical team proceeded with struggling for stability.

The euphoria from the launch of the first arena gradually died down, and it turned out that sales were growing slower than we expected. We phoned all the customers who refused to buy our franchise and found out that the main reason for rejection was a large lump-sum payment, not to mention the fact that customers also had to purchase expensive equipment at the cost of nearly $25 000.

We decided to change our business model: we reduced the lump-sum payment and increased royalties. Now our strategic goal was not making quick earnings from franchise sales, but ensuring long-term efficiency through royalties.

When we opened our first full-immersion VR location, interested entrepreneurs from other cities and even countries began to fly to Novosibirsk to try our game first-hand.

Very soon, we had similar VR arenas in Saratov, Kazan and even Luxembourg. Of course, not everyone was happy with the idea of flying to Novosibirsk, so we agreed to meet with clients at conferences in Europe and the USA.

The Deep VR arena in Kazan

In June 2019, we attended the Up The Game Conference in Amsterdam, and in October, we participated in IAPPA, the largest entertainment conference held in Orlando. That way, we got similar total-immersion VR playing sites in Amsterdam, Mumbai, Sydney, and Glasgow.

The Up The Game Conference in Amsterdam

While some part of our sales team was actively visiting exhibitions and attending conferences, another was increasing online sales through the following channels:

PPC advertising.

Various landing pages.

Emailing to everyone who had similar equipment to facilitate the opening.

Emailing to the owners of quests and other entertainment centers.

Growth

In September 2019, HTC released the Wireless Adapter, which made it possible to attach an antenna to the helmet and remove the computer from the shoulders and hide it. We finally managed to wean off the players of the heavy backpacks; at least, of three of them, as the HTC Wireless Adapter supports only three channels in one room. One player still has to carry a backpack PC on their back.

Our second game Shmooter

An analysis of the open franchises’ efficiency showed that despite high attendance, the customer retention ratio was quite low. It was necessary to somehow stimulate people to come again. In the summer of 2019, we began to develop a second PvP game to play on the people’s competition instinct, and we also arranged a global team rating across all associated platforms in the world.