VR’s Next Big Battle Royale Shooter Goes into Open Beta Today, Trailer Here

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Mar 1, 2024

Caveman Studio, the developers behind team-based shooter Contractors (2018), today released the open beta of Contractors Showdown, its upcoming battle royale game for Quest and SteamVR headsets.

The 45-player battle royale shooter presents a pretty big battlefield, touting a 16km² island that’s around a quarter the size of Manhattan, albeit including a mix of landscape with the standard array of dilapidated buildings, various landmarks, hills, and other structures to hide around.

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You can squad up with up to three players, or go it alone as you parachute down from your starting point at the airplane, giving you a chance to pick your route before the zone closes which kills those outside. Basic battle royale stuff—but a ton more immersive thanks to the keen gun-handling, climbing ability, backpack inventory system, vertical zipline and parachute that lets you cover distances quickly.

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And as you’d expect from any PUBG-inspired game, there’s a whole arsenal littered around the map to choose from too, including pistols, SMGs, automatic rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, grenades, flashbangs, and more. That comes along with weapon customization, gear upgrades, damage indicators, and more.

The open beta is set to last from March 1st to March 17th. You can play for free right now on Steam or Quest 2/3/Pro via the Quest Store.

Note: you won’t find Contractors Showdown through the search function on Quest. Only direct ‘access request’ links work, like the one above and those distributed through the official Discord (link below).

It’s not certain when we’ll see official launch, although the game’s Steam page notes it will arrive sometime after April 1st (Q2 2024). To keep tabs on further development, you can also join the Contractor Showdow Discord (invite link).

ViRGiN

Cool to see brand new title, instead of never-ending ‘early access’ the likes of Onward and Pavlov, regardless of platform.
Onward despite Meta aquistion is still a complete joke (pre-Quest version was never good to begin with); Pavlov is split into multiple player bases with lack of crossbuy, PCVR version being a complete joke despite move to UE5.

45 players multiplayer on Quest is probably the most impressive achivement. And the performance has been very good in closed beta already.

This might be the GOTY, seeing the public response.
YouTubers keep making videos cause they genuinely enjoy the game, rather than taking sponsorships as seen by recent Vail VR videos.
Recent Alvo VR on SteamVR has peaked at 7 concurrent players, currently 0 online. What a flop.
- Cl
  
  See I knew you used concurrent players to see if a game is a flop, but you couldn’t answer the question. Of course meta doesn’t put out concurrent user numbers.
  - ViRGiN
    
    And Steam reports fake numbers. What’s your point?
    
    Games are flopping left and right. Maybe you want to talk about successfull launch of Alvo VR on PCVR?
    - Cl
      
      My point was, when I asked you before how you consider a game being a flop, you played dumb when I knew you used concurrent users. Meta doesn’t even put out those numbers.
      
      You also talked crap about how I downvoted you and look at what you do.
      - ViRGiN
        
        What are you even talking about?
        You can jump online and see how many players are in game yourself.
        I was likely talking about releases on PCVR being complete flops. And yeah, if the concurrent/peak numbers are absymal, yeah, it is a flop, what sort of crazy pills are you taking to think otherwise?
        
        Trigger yourself some more with these SteamVR numbers:
        – Gorilla Tag 24h peak – 1393
        – Beat Saber – 887
        – Hubris – 10
        – Vertigo 2 – 21
        – Arizona Sunshine 2 – 69
      - Cl
        
        Show me concurrent meta numbers so we can see how well they are doing then.
      - ViRGiN
        
        Check ghost of tabor website.
        3441 players reported – Steam reports 648, so 2793 players are on Quest platform, as the game is not released anywhere else.
        And this is for the hyper-rare case where the game did not immediatly flop on PCVR. In fact, it’s one the most popular games for the past few months, currently #3, just after Gorilla Tag and Beat Saber.
        
        That’s just metric for one game. But of course, you will never accept the fact that games on PCVR massively flop all the time, all because Meta doesn’t publish their numbers LMAO
      - ViRGiN
        
        5 hours later update:
        6376 currently in game, Steam = 778; Quest 5598
- kakek
  
  The beta is free, but I don’t think they are going F2P after the beta though. So we might see a shard drop of players later.
  Honnestly, I think not going F2P is a mistake. VR population is to small. You need the casuals that only play a game once in a while and won’t fork money for it, if only to fill the servers.
  
  Appart from that, it’s not al ugly as I would have expected for a large map on mobile VR. And at least the PC version doesn’t lag. ( You’d think quest games running smoothly on vastly more powerfull PC would be a given, but let’s be fair it isn’t. )
  
  I’d like to have a more develloped opinon, but I waited 15 minutes and couldn’t get ingame.
  It’s beta launch, I’ll just wait a retry in a few days.
  - ViRGiN
    
    I don’t think it’s going to be free either, which might be a fatal mistake in near future. If you can’t jump from one lobby to another within 3 minutes, it’s going to turn off a lot of people.
    But so far reception has been great, now its in open beta, and we will see launch in a month or two i think.
    
    Oh and they also bumped player count from 45 to 60, incl Quest. Amazing.
    - kakek
      
      Yeah, games are not that long. People are not going to spend 50% of their time waiting for games to start. They NEED that high player count.
      Population one for instance ended up switching to F2P anyway.
      Might as well learn from their mistake, start F2P right away, hope they can maintain high player count and compensate with ingame transactions.
Octogod

Love the trailer.

Edit: Quest link is seeing a 404 error.
CaryMGVR

Link “the Quest Store” is busted.
Nevets

Oh a sbooter. How thrilling. Based on a similar shooter by the same dev. Pushing the envelope even more.
- NL_VR
  
  Its Battleroyale
  So what would you want for game?
  - Nevets
    
    A third person adventure exploration game like Edge of Nowhere or Tomb Raider. There’s none. They’re all shovelware clones of shovelware.
    - NL_VR
      
      Try asgards wrath 2.
      Third person games hasn’t really hit on the VR market yet. Its verry underrated genre imo.
      Maybe you should try VR mods if you have PC of such games.