“Taking the VR Gaming Throne”
Each and every year, Fast Company publishes a list of the world’s Most Innovative Companies. It’s a list that nearly every company wants to appear on, but so few ever get the chance. At Resolution Games, we are incredibly humbled and honored to be included in this year’s selection of the world’s most innovative AR and VR companies.
But what does innovation even mean?
While it’s flattering to be called one of the world’s most innovative companies, the truth is that we’re really just playing our part in one of the world’s most innovative industries. VR and AR are at the forefront of immersive experiences — and we’re most likely years — not decades — away from an era of spatial computing that will redefine the way we interact digitally, blending the tangible and intangible in ways that today seem like science fiction. The incredible innovations being done in our industry now are already paving the way for this.
Our role in innovating — and the one that Fast Company seemingly took note of — isn’t exclusively tied to this future. Instead it’s about what we can do today to preserve a fundamental element of the human experience as AR and VR grow: social connection.
At Resolution Games, we believe it's essential that as new technologies are developed, they continue to focus on the principles that see humanity as its best. For us, that means finding ways to use these new technologies to bring people together. We celebrate the ability of games to connect us; to create meaningful shared experiences. Online games have had a rich history of helping to foster new communities and friendships. VR and AR are bringing this concept to its ultimate realization; creating multi-user experiences that deliver unparalleled immersion by simulating or augmenting our bodies and environments.
For once, we’re working with a technology that really lives up to the notion of “the next best thing to being there.”
How we got here.
Resolution Games was founded in 2015, at the precipice of the next great era of VR. While the tools weren’t in place to deliver on our vision just yet, we had a keen sense of what was coming — and growing alongside the industry helped us to get there.
And we’ve reached some incredible milestones along the way:
2016: Released Wonderglade, one of the first mobile VR games for Google Daydream
2017: Mobile VR fishing game Bait! Reaches 1 million downloads on Samsung’s Gear VR, reaching 20% of all devices sold at that time
2018: Developed the first third-party game release for the Magic Leap, Angry Birds FPS: First Person Slingshot
2019: Acron: Attack of the Squirrels! launches — a party game that extended beyond headsets to support players on smartphone devices as well, creating shared gaming experiences across VR and non-VR mobile for the first time
2020: Ozo Lounge, a proto-metaverse experience providing a communal social hub for players in our dueling title Blaston launches, paving the way for our vision of how massive connected realities may take shape
2021: Demeo launches and quickly becomes our most successful original IP to date, immersing players together in a tabletop gaming experience and winning several Game of the Year awards along the way
2021: Became the first publisher to release a passthrough experience on the Meta Oculus Store, letting Blaston players turn their real world environments into a dueling arena
2022: Having just launched Heroes’ Hangout in Demeo (the next example of our tinyverse approach), we’re now gearing up for our first non-VR launch ever: Demeo: PC Edition is coming to Steam on April 7 – the first VR game to be rebuilt from the ground-up for non-VR players.
Where we go next.
As I write this, we are currently the largest third-party publisher of Oculus games on Meta’s VR App Store — and our total number of released titles will be growing again before the year is out. We’ve also recently launched a new division dedicated to innovating new gameplay experiences in augmented reality, building on our already strong presence in the space. And later this year we’re launching our next original title, Ultimechs, that will help to grow team-based sports games in VR.
As an industry, we’re entering the next phase of something great. VR adoption rates are at an all-time high and show no signs of slowing. Bigger tech players are entering the space, with new devices for both AR and VR expected in the coming years as a result. And as the industry grows, we continue to work closely with our partners to ensure we’re growing with them, making sure we’re ready to support whatever comes next.
