Even with a wide selection of gameplay videos and written reviews, it’s hard to know if you should buy a VR game without ever having tried it yourself. Oculus’ solution: extended all-access free weekends on select titles. To that effect, Oculus is putting out two free weekends this month for magic dueling game Wands (2017) and space dogfighter EVE: Valkyrie (2016).
CCP Games’ EVE: Valkyrie has been on Rift since the headset’s launch in 2016, but has gone through some pretty dramatic changes over the last two years, now including crossplay support for PSVR and Vive, and more recently support for traditional monitors via PS4 and PC.
While Oculus didn’t make specific mention in its blogpost whether the free weekend for the online magic dueler Wands would be for Gear VR or Rift, production studio Cortopia Studios told Road to VR that the free weekend will include both Gear VR and Rift platforms.
As it appears now, Oculus seems to be making a regular habit of hosting free weekends; in the last few months they’ve let Rift owners into Onward (2017), SPARC (2017), From Other Suns (2017), and most recently Eleven: Table Tennis VR (2016).
While it isn’t a perfect solution to the lack of demos, it makes a lot of sense when it comes to multiplayer games at least. Multiplayer concurrent numbers on many VR games are fairly low, so opening up the game for free for a short period of time could hypothetically reinvigorate the player base.
We’ll be keeping an eye on all upcoming free weekends, so check back soon.
Update (11:30 AM ET): Cortopia reached out to Road to VR, saying that the free weekend for ‘Wands’ will be available on both Rift and Gear VR platforms.