Beat Saber studio Beat Games has been purchased by Facebook and will become an independently operated arm of Oculus Studios, according to an announcement made today. In a statement issued by Mike Verdu, AR and VR Director of Content at Facebook, the pickup is "just the beginning" of Facebook's plans to "accelerate VR" via acquisitions.

"Beat Games is a strong team with proven potential across VR, games, and music," Verdu writes. "With the resources and know-how that we can offer, Beat Games will be able to accelerate, adding more music and more exciting features to Beat Saber as well as bringing the game to more people."

The existing Beat Games studio will remain in Prague, Czech Republic, and updates across non-Oculus platforms will still continue. Meanwhile, plans for a new 360 Levels mode, as well as forthcoming musical additions, haven't been abandoned in the transition. In an FAQ, Verdu hoped to allay fears that Facebook's acquisition might "ruin" Beat Games.

"I’ve been in the industry for a while and have seen that firsthand. However, I’ve also seen and been a part of some incredible success stories," he wrote. "The story we aim to prove over time is this: An indie studio joins forces with some like-minded allies, and together they find a way to push VR to new heights."

On the topic of modding, the statement is sterner. "We understand and appreciate the value that modding brings to Beat Saber when done so legally and within our policies. We’re going to do our best to preserve the value that mods bring to the Beat Saber player base," Verdu said.

"As a reminder, our most recent policy updates give more clarity to how developer mode is intended to be used, such as helping developers build their apps or for enthusiasts to explore new concepts. It is not intended for engaging in piracy or illicit modding, including mods that infringe on third-party IP rights or contain malicious code."

Rhythm game Beat Saber, one of the best VR games around, has released its first paid DLC song pack—a collection of 10 tracks from Canadian electronic record label Monstercat.

Up until now, Beat Saber players have slashed their way through the tracks that come bundled with the game as well as user-created custom songs. The new DLC pack, called Monstercat Music Pack Vol. 1, is the first of three planned paid music packs.

It costs $12.90/£11, and you can grab it here. Individual tracks will cost you $1.99.

Some players aren't happy about paying for their VR music, and developer Beat Games addressed those concerns in a blog post yesterday. Creating new levels for the game is an "extremely complex process" involving music labels, extensive testing and licensing music, it said.

"Licensing music costs money, we are sharing revenue with artists and labels and we are paying our mappers team too," the developer said. "We believe, that quality content deserves recognition. Also, we want our players who prefer to get their content legally, to have a chance to purchase new music content with respect to law."

The team will continue to add free tracks "regularly", it said—League of Legends' hit K-pop song is an example of a recent free addition.

If follows an interview with Variety this week in which Beat Games founder Jaroslav Beck revealed the game had sold more than one million copies across all platforms.

Valve has been forced to update the Steam VR beta in order to keep up with 'Beat Saber experts.' according to the patch notes, released on Friday.

"Increase limits of what we thought was humanly possible for controller motion based on tracking data from Beat Saber experts," the patch notes stated.

It seems that there are "sanity checks" in place within the VR programming to prevent movement being misread. One of these checks is the presumed maximum speed that it's physically possible for someone to move their wrist, but it seems Beat Saber players have proved them wrong, prompting the update. 

Valve developer Ben Jackson stepped into the comments to clarify the situation. "The tracking system has internal sanity checks to identify when things go wrong." stated Jackson. "For example, if our math says you are *behind* your only basestation, clearly we made a mistake, because we wouldn't be getting any signal from behind the basestation. One of these checks relates to how fast we thought it was physically possible for someone to turn their wrist. It turns out that a properly motivated human using a light enough controller could go faster (3600 degrees/sec!) than we thought."

If you're unfamiliar with Beat Saber, imagine Guitar Hero with lightsabers and you won't be far off the mark. The VR rhythm game entered Early Access last May and has earned Overwhelmingly Positive reviews on Steam since then. If you're curious as to how the game looks and plays, it's well worth checking out this perfect run of a custom Beat Saber track.

Thanks, Road to VR!

Star Wars meets Guitar Hero is the elevator pitch for Beat Saber, an Early Access VR rhythm game that's making waves on Steam. The game comes with a limited number of tracks but users can build their own, and an active community has grown at beatsaver.com, where people upload their creations set to songs of their choice. You can watch one such custom track played in the video above, and it's mind-bogglingly cool. It's the kind of thing that makes you want to go out and buy a VR headset on the spot.

The video, uploaded by Ruirize, starts of calmly enough, as he slashes his dual lightsabers at the coloured blocks in time to the beat. And then the music picks up and blocks start pelting him, coming in pairs in quick succession. In Beat Saber, you have to hit each block from a particular direction, so he almost looks like proper Jedi, twirling his laser swords to get the right angles. It's beautifully hectic.

It's a modded version of the game: from what I can tell some of the visuals, especially in the background, have been tweaked from the base version. It's filmed using LIV, which is basically a cube that you can project VR games onto, allowing you to film someone in third-person while they're playing wearing a headset.

Only marginally less cool is another video, below, in which one player has stuck his lightsabers together like Darth Maul. He's using ProTube VR, which can hold one VR controller on each end, essentially combining the two lightsabers into one. It makes the game a lot harder, but he's playing without directional slashing to make it manageable. Take a peek (and hat tip to UploadVR for the spot):

You can pick up Beat Saber for $19.99/£15.49 on Steam or the Oculus store. If you want to find out more, then Jack interviewed the creator here. 

If you haven't heard of Beat Saber before, then you're not alone—I only caught wind of it earlier today. But this Early Access VR rhythm game, which is basically a lightsaber version of Guitar Hero, is now the highest rated game on Steam. It's clocked nearly 2,000 reviews with a 99% positive rating, which is enough to put it above everything except the Witcher 3's DLC expansion pass. It's going to change a lot before it leaves Early Access later this year, starting with a major update next week that will let players create custom levels set to their own audio files.

The current version is essentially an arcade mode with a limited number of songs, but it's still got players hooked. The premise is simple: you slash at coloured cubes as they come towards you to the beat, and each one will only be smashed if you hit it from a particular angle. If you want more on the game itself, then Jack interviewed the creator here. 

The level editor will be the same one that the development team at Hyperbolic Magnetism used to create the existing levels, and players will be able to export their own creations and then send them to people they know. It won't have "simple sharing"—which I presume just means you can't upload your tracks for the community to try out—but I'm sure people will start disseminating their own designs via Reddit or forums. 

The main Beat Saber Twitter account today tweeted that we'd find out more information on Friday, but then the game's creator said that it might be ready before that.

You can pick up Beat Saber for $19.99/£15.49 on Steam or the Oculus store.

Once again, Jack's piece is a good place to start if you want to find out more about the game. Watch a short gameplay clip below, and thanks to Road to VR for flagging the Steam rating.

I first saw Hyperbolic Magnetism's Beat Saber on Twitter. Someone retweeted the 30-second video of the VR rhythm game above and I was hooked immediately. 

The idea is that you wield two lightsabers and slash at colored cubes as they zoom toward you. You can't just flail wildly at them, though. Each cube is tied to a particular beat and has an arrow indicating the direction you should strike it from. It's Stars Wars meets Guitar Hero. 

Ján Ilavský, the lead developer on Beat Saber, initially came up with the idea after he bought an HTC Vive and was dissatisfied with the rhythm games on offer. He felt many of them failed to satisfyingly tie the action to the beat, and started to think about how he would go about making one instead.

"I bought the HTC Vive more than a year ago, and I was really looking forward to play some rhythm games, particularly Audioshield," Ilavský elaborates. "I started to play it […] and I didn’t feel the rhythm as much as I was expecting.

"It was fun, but I was looking for something more precise. Where I could feel each note. So I started to think about how to make something similar but to make it feel much more [rhythmic]. The cutting was [the solution we came up with]. So, I made a quick prototype cutting some cubes and we realized it worked really well."

It wasn't always about lightsabers. In an early build, it used standard swords instead. Ilávský changed this, however, after playtests revealed that people were too focused on the angle of their blades and weren't having fun with the rhythm. 

"[The decision] doesn’t actually have anything to do with Star Wars," Ilavský says, perhaps with an eye toward Disney's lawyers. "The first thing we actually had wasn't even a lightsaber. We computed the angle of how high you're holding the saber, but it wasn't good. The obvious choice was to use lightsabers instead, because there's no angle, so you can cut in any direction."

Ilavský is working alongside two other talented individuals: Vladimír Hrinčár, who is responsible for the programming and game design, and the musician Jaroslav Beck. Beck is composing the soundtrack and has worked on a bunch of high-profile projects in the past, scoring music for the Overwatch short films, World of Warcraft, and coincidentally enough the TV spots for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The team also aims to incorporate community contributions, with players able to create and share their own levels, and integrate music streaming services like YouTube and Spotify.

Beat Saber looks extremely promising. That initial tweet I saw has blown up significantly, being retweeted over 8,500 times.

"It was a big surprise," Ilavský says, clearly taken aback by how much publicity the short video created for the game. "This was just like, 'Yeah, let's make a small video to remind people we are doing something.' It took me like five minutes to make it. To record the gameplay, to edit it in Final Cut, and to finally release it. And it just happened. [What's funny] is that we were planning to make a huge trailer with actors and stuff." 

Ilavský believes the teaser went viral because of the simplicity of Beat Saber's premise combined with Beck's soundtrack and its escalation. You can immediately tell what you're supposed to do simply by looking at it, but as the clip goes on and music drops it shows that there's a steepening difficulty curve.

The support they’ve received since they released the video has meant a lot to the team. "In March last year, we stopped working on Beat Saber, because we didn’t know how to move forward. We thought like, 'Maybe, this is not the right game to do now.' Then some people asked us to show them the game at some small event. So, we brought the HTC Vive there and like 30 people played the game and they really pushed us to continue working on it.

"It’s really good to hear [the response to the demo]. Usually, when you show a game and it's mediocre or just normal, all your friends tell you, 'Yeah, it's good,' and you're like, 'OK. Maybe.'  But when people say they are going to buy a VR headset just because of your game, then it's different story."

Beat Saber doesn’t have an official release date yet, but both Oculus and HTC Vive support is planned. You can keep track of the development on Twitter and on its website.