About fitness VR games

Surprisingly fitness turned out to be one of the most common use-cases for VR these days.

Who would have thought?

Certainly not me, nor Oculus or Meta. There is a lesson there, but I will just ignore it for now.

I would like to talk a bit about fitness VR games and the state they are in. What may be bit of a surprise to you is that I am quite disappointed with the current state.

There seems to be this range: On one side you have pure fitness app with VR headset and on the other pure game.

Fitness app ———————————————————————– Game

There is actually quite a bit of space between them and what disappoints me about the current stage is that vast majority of popular games are almost all the way to the left.

Let’s look at popular fitness games: BeatSaber and FitXR.

FitXR is so much on the left it’s not even a game. BeatSaber has some game-like elements, but I would mostly consider it dancing game, still quite a bit closer to the left than right.

There are of course VR experiences that are a lot more games than fitness for example: Gorn, Racket NX, Until you fall or Thrill of the fight.

It seems like a lot of success comes from taking real life sport and translating it into a VR game.

Racket NX – Squash

Thrill of The Fight – Boxing

Gorn – Gladiators? (Can I count it as a sport?)

We would find a lot more examples if we tried of course.

Until you fall is probably closest to what I am looking for. It’s a great Rogue-like sword fighting game.
I would love to see more of these. Just imagine crazy sports possible only in VR.

Games that make you move and burn bunch of calories. God damn VR resistance training dungeon crawler.

I tried to create game in this genre SuperSword. It’s about space police training camp where you do bunch of exercises to fight virtual robots, so to prepare yourself to fight real robots.
Well, it didn’t workout. It wasn’t financially viable at that time.

I hope someone picks it up tho. I would love to play some cool VR games I can fit in my fitness routine.

So, if you are thinking about making a VR fitness game, please take a minute and see if you can move it to the right and make a game instead of a VR fitness app.

PS: If you know about cool VR fitness games, not apps do let me know!

Vojta