Indie VR developer Mixed Realms, creators of badass VR ninja simulator, Sairento, announced this week plans for their next chapter, coming in the form of Sairento Reborn. Described as “bigger and better,” Sairento Reborn hopes to open up the title, allowing cooperative hack & slash fun for both VR and PC players.
Speaking this week at the HTC’s Vive X demo day in San Francisco, Singapore-based indie studio Mixed Realms said that their first title, Sairento, has turned a significant profit, to the tune of a claimed “3,000% ROI” on an initial development fund of $30,000 (which would work out to $900,000); the developers tell us they’ve sold about 40,000 units so far.
Sairento, which plays like a mashup between Raw Data (2017) and Superhot VR (2017), offers players the chance to become an agile super-ninja, wielding swords, guns, bows, and more. The game has been released across all major VR platforms (Steam, Oculus, and Viveport), and holds respectable ratings across the board. The title began its life in Early Access on Steam in late 2016 and claimed its full launch in February, 2018.
Aiming to springboard off of their initial success, developer Mixed Realms said during the Vive X event that they’re planning to raise $3 million for the production of the next chapter, Sairento Reborn. From the description offered by the developers, the new title sounds more like a reboot, with a much larger scope than the original, and one major goal being to open the door to PC players as well as VR players, allowing both to play with and against each other.
The plan, the developers say, is to offer the same kind of first-person action as the original, for VR players, while PC players will play the game in third person. The studio plans to balance each side fairly, but uniquely. Mixed Realms says they plan to sell Sairento Reborn at a lower price than the original, but will monetize further with subscription and microtransaction options—they pointed to Overwatch (2016) as a game successfully monetizing with this model.
As one reason why they want to open the game to PC players, Mixed Realms pointed toward VRChat’s viral outbreak—no doubt owed to its accessibility by both VR and PC players—which has secured the game a spot among Steam’s top 100 games by concurrent player count.
During the event Mixed Realms also affirmed plans plan to bring the original Sairento to PSVR, and expect it to hit the platform in 2018.
Update (3/30/18): An earlier version of this article mistakenly transposed some digits and stated that Sairento had earned $9,000,000 in revenue instead of $900,000; this has been fixed accordingly.