Beat Saber, the acclaimed VR rhythm game, is soon to get a special version, Beat Saber Arcade, which will offer officially sanctioned use of the game in out-of-home VR arcades.

Despite Beat Saber’s seamingly perfect fit for VR arcades—thanks to its ease of understanding and quick fun—developer Beat Games hasn’t yet offered a means of commercial licensing for the game, which would give VR arcade operators the rights to offer the game to their customers.

Today the company announced that Beat Saber Arcade will be released in “a few weeks,” and further said they had planned to offer commercial licensing from the beginning but that the small indie team has been stretched working on the forthcoming level editor and the PSVR version of the game.

“We couldn’t be more grateful for the positive response from the Beat Saber community and hope you find our delay to make earlier arcade announcements more a reflection of our commitment to quality than anything else,” the company writes.

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The studio says they’ll release more details soon as to when and where Beat Saber Arcade will be available.

While the existing version of Beat Saber is already a good fit for VR arcades, we expect the arcade version will use local leaderboards by default, and possibly have some additional customizations to enhance the game for the arcade setting.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • impurekind

    Totally makes sense.

    An AR version this would properly be even cooler in arcade–maybe in some alternate future where AR isn’t basically sh*t like it is now–because the person playing would both be able to see the game and the people around watching in awe as they play, and people playing games like this at arcades needs to know they have an audience loving their moves.

    • JJ

      interesting, I think that will be part of the future of arcades.

      its pretty funny seeing people bash on AR, yeah its not what you want or imagine ar to be just yet, but some of the most skilled programmers in the world are working on breaking edge tech thats growing so damn fast. I think i just come from a place where i am developing for AR the instant it comes out so i see the progression immediately and first hand. I’m pretty amazed at whats to come and most of the coolest demos are in house and kept pretty tight so the public hasn’t seen them yet.

      So i’d just be careful saying AR is shit because its progressing literally by leaps and bounds every day. Too many people see an ar app and go oh thats not what I imagined AR to be or expect it to instantly be super good, but very very very very soon it will be what you imagined I can guarantee.

      • Sandy Wich

        Idk bud, we’re years away from having the fantasy AR demos working as perfect as previously marketed, and that’s just until we see the consumer product because what HoloLens/Magic Leap are showing right now are either not practical, cost too much, are bulky or buggy or have glitchy AR app tracking. Basically they’re nice, but nothing special, yet, “god knows VR isn’t perfect either”. And even once you get that, quality content has to be made. Even if a perfect AR headset dropped it won’t go anywhere without some must-have applications or games, right? A market cannot thrive on demos. But maybe some 3rd party ports like Google Earth AR would be super cool?

        I do think it’s only a matter of time till they get there as well though.. I am excited to see what AR can do, but i’m personally not really into the AR headsets. I’m much more interested in AR in-house technology. Ben here even mentioned AR windshields in cars, “Hopefully self-driving cars because damn people gonna die.”

        In the end I think AR is going to take much longer than VR but it’s uses may extend pass VR’s limited scope in the long run. It’s a pretty cool time to be an enthusiast that’s for certain.

      • impurekind

        Not convinced. If there was something worth showing right now in AR–I mean something truly exciting and meaningful, not just a throwaway gimmick or boring lifestyle application–we’d have seen at least a few examples of it already, just like we saw a whole bunch of genuinely amazing stuff in VR on the Rift DK1/DK2/etc long before it ever saw a consumer release. And we’ve seen quite a things for AR to date, but most of them have just been gimmicky meh imo–much like basically everything on Kinect. I have no doubt AR will eventually have its time, but right now I’m just not impressed by anything I’ve seen for VR (in all its current forms).

    • Sandy Wich

      You might be right but I think Beat Saber is going to be long forgotten by the time AR devices are good enough to give legit exciting experiences people will go to arcades for.

      • impurekind

        True dat.