Payday owner Starbreeze to open VR arcade

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This morning in I'm-not-sure-what-to-make-of-this: Payday 2 owners Starbreeze Studios is to open a VR arcade based on its own StarVR headsets—a StarCade, as the team is calling it. The StarCade will open in Los Angeles at some point in spring or summer with the aim of making high-end VR accessible to all, and presumably garner some hype for their swanky tech and Overkill's The Walking Dead, which will be the star attraction (geddit?).

“We continue to iterate the fact that VR really needs to be experienced in person to fully be able to appreciate the phenomenon," CTO Emmanuel Marquez says. "We will invite developers to join us and give them the opportunity to put their content in our StarCade. We as an industry continuously need to educate ourselves to make VR truly successful, and this is just the first step in our planning to do so."

He's not wrong on that first point: VR does need to be seen to be believed, and a traditional arcade set-up might be just the thing to get people onboard with new and expensive hardware.

Starbreeze's acquisition of InfinitEye and its HMD last June came as a surprise given its traditional software focus, but StarVR does have some standout features, chiefly a 210-degree field of view through 5.5-inch panels running at a hopefully not eye-watering 5120x1440 resolution. It could be the 21st-century equivalent of a light gun and a 50-inch CRT in a cabinet.