Bows, Arrows, and Physics!
QuiVr is an Archery game which has stood out among other wave shooters in the market due to its full focus on arrow physics and solid bow.
Instead of shooting assault rifles or laser guns, players will be knocking out arrows into the heads of countless enemies. It’s similar to The Lab’s Longbow mini-game but can be considered a full version with multiplayer that many people have always wanted.
Jonathan Schenker, the sole programmer, and Aaron Stanton, his business partner reported that the game generated about $700,000 having been sold at $20 per copy. This was however before Valve took for itself 30 percent share for the steam store. Aaron helped with the business development, marketing of the game and the design alongside a split of $30,000 investment on the project for the art made for the game.
The game, however, couldn’t make the same grand sales like other Indie VR games such as Beat Saber and H3VR with each selling about 100,000 copies even while being sold at the same price as QuiVr.
H3VR which was an experimental shooting game sold nearly 100,000 copies at $20 each between 2016 and 2018 while Beat Saber made the same achievement in just one month in 2018
Speaking on how the sales were made, Schenker was into real-life archery and had no idea that Valve’s lab had its own archery game before he decided to try the HTC Vive by prototyping an archery game in the Unity game engine.
“I had a full-time job as a web developer and was happy just working on my archery game on the side with some feedback from the early adopters of VR on Steam and Reddit.”
He continued by stating that When Stanton played the game for the first time, he commented that the demo could be downloaded where the user could shoot a guy walking on the screen but because there was no respawn mechanic, the user would need to keep quitting and restarting the game.
However, he further stated that Aaron played a significant role in his involvement and he was convinced that it was worth making his primary focus.
Thanks to outsourcing art, QuiVr was able to transform from a generic fantasy game to a game with its own story. Stanton’s experience at Booklamp made the work quite easy as he already had all the skills he needed.
Together, their corresponding goals ensured the progress of the project, alongside the respect they had for each other with clear communication. They had to analyze all the games in the market to compare them with the traction they got on the demo and later split the investment into two even though Schenker remained the dominant partner. Later on, they began to make sales of around 100 units in a day for quite some months and 150 in a day during summer sales.
Schenker and Stanton stated that their corresponding goals were crucial to their partnership coupled with respect for each other’s strengths and clear communication.
