XR Daily: Schell Games' First Layoffs in 24 Years

Schell Games Lays Off 10 Percent, Its First Layoffs in 24 Years

Schell Games, the veteran studio behind I Expect You to Die and Among Us 3D, confirmed layoffs affecting roughly 10 percent of staff. It is the first layoff in the studio’s history. CEO Jesse Schell put it plainly in a statement to Good Virtual Reality: “In 24 years as a studio, this is the first time we’ve found it necessary to have a layoff, so it was very difficult for everyone.”

After the cuts, the studio employs about 125 people. Schell framed it as rebalancing, not retrenchment. The studio had been working on a smaller number of larger titles, and the math stopped working: “the way the industry is right now, it became very clear that working on a greater number of smaller projects is what will be sustainable.”

The XR-specific detail is the one that matters here. Schell says headset-based VR was once 80 percent of the studio’s work and is now closer to 30 percent, with more of the pipeline shifting to “VR adjacent” work like interactive projection for location-based entertainment. The studio still has a new VR title in production and proposals for others, but this is a real signal about where a two-decade VR pillar sees sustainable revenue right now.

→ Road to VR

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Beat Saber’s Hip Hop Mixtape 2 Lands With Kendrick Lamar and Doja Cat

Beat Saber’s second hip hop pack is out now on Quest and PC VR, and the tracklist is the strongest argument yet for how far the game’s licensing has come. Eight tracks, all contemporary: Kendrick Lamar’s “tv off,” Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow’s “INDUSTRY BABY,” Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More,” JID’s “Surround Sound,” Lil Wayne’s “6 Foot 7 Foot,” Cardi B’s “I Like It,” Doechii’s “NISSAN ALTIMA,” and Tommy Richman’s “MILLION DOLLAR BABY.”

The pack costs $10.99, or $1.99 per track, and each map ships with a custom lightshow. Like the first Mixtape, the songs are uncensored, gated behind the explicit lyric toggle available to users over 13. The 2024 original leaned on legacy acts (Grandmaster Flash, Dr. Dre, 2Pac) as a 50th-anniversary tribute; this one is squarely about current chart artists.

It is also a quiet nod to the headset landscape. Beat Saber was recently Steam Frame certified, so it is ready to run standalone on Valve’s upcoming headset whenever that ships.

→ UploadVR

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Out-of-Home XR Is Quietly Building While Consumer VR Regroups

Industry analyst Kevin Williams has a good counterweight to the doom-and-gloom around consumer VR gaming: the location-based entertainment (LBE) sector is still growing. In a guest piece for Road to VR, he frames out-of-home XR as a B2B2C play that puts headsets in front of people who would never buy one, wrapped around IP they already care about.

The concrete numbers: Zero Latency’s Jumanji: The Lost Levels, developed with Sony Pictures, goes live across more than 170 venues in December. Sandbox VR has grown to around 90 venues internationally, running six-player experiences with haptic vests and environmental effects, and it has licensed hits like Squid Game Virtual (with Netflix) and Stranger Things: Catalyst.

The through-line is social play rather than solo shooting. This dovetails neatly with Schell Games’ own pivot toward location-based projection work, which is why the two stories read better together.

→ Road to VR

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Tripo Is Chasing the Gap Between Generating a Model and Shipping One

Generating a 3D model from an image got dramatically easier in the last few years. Making that model production-ready did not. AI output frequently arrives with messy topology, hard-to-edit materials, and inconsistent geometry, which turns an impressive result into hours of cleanup.

Dr. Yanpei Cao, co-founder and chief scientist at Vast (Tripo), is attacking exactly that gap. His background is geometry processing at Tsinghua University and 3D digitization at Owlii (later acquired by Kuaishou). The pitch for Tripo’s Smart Mesh is usable topology in seconds, with more artist control over the generated asset, plus texturing, rigging, and part separation handled by the platform.

The ambition goes beyond single assets. Cao frames the shift as moving from individual asset generation toward complete interactive worlds, with Gaussian splats in the mix. It is a useful signal of where the AI 3D field is heading: from “look what the model made” toward “here is something a professional pipeline can actually absorb.”

→ 80 Level

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Baldur’s Gate 3’s See-Through-Walls Trick, Rebuilt in Godot

The occlusion cutout in Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of those small touches that quietly makes the game feel better: walls fade out so you can still see your character mid-combat instead of the camera fighting the geometry. 3D artist Nando rebuilt the effect as a Godot 4.7.1 shader, letting you observe a character through any object blocking the camera without simply hiding the obstruction.

The shader will likely land on Godot Shaders soon. It is part of a small wave of the same effect being ported around: Brendan “Sully” Sullivan recreated it in Unreal Engine, a solo developer known as MetallCore999 made a Unity dissolve-shader variant, and Ablaze Interactive built a custom occlusion system for its upcoming Psych Rift. A nice example of one studio’s polish becoming a shared technique across engines.

→ 80 Level

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Snoop Dogg Is Hitman’s New Limited-Time Elusive Target

Snoop Dogg is the latest celebrity to land in Hitman: World of Assassination. The Herbalist, announced at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, is a free limited-time Elusive Target mission running August 27 through September 26.

You play Agent 47 hunting Dr. Cyrus Cane, an entrepreneur about to launch “Morsizzles,” a cookie he claims is addictively tasty, while covering up deaths from internal product testing. The mission needs the Haven Island location. It follows a tradition of famous faces in Elusive Targets: Milla Jovovich, Sean Bean, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Eminem, and Wiz Khalifa. The game is playable in VR on Steam and PSVR 2.

→ UploadVR

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Quick Bites

• Galaxium: an experimental WebGPU space explorer that hit Hacker News’ front page this week. Explore the universe in 3D in your browser. → galaxium.app
• Nomad Sculpt: the mobile sculpting app adds direct app linking to Blender and ZBrush, tightening the tablet-to-desktop loop. → 80 Level
• Where Winds Meet: the open-world action RPG crossed 100 million players. → 80 Level
• Fog and VFX for UE5: a new high-performance fog and VFX toolset is out for Unreal Engine 5. → 80 Level