Why are the updates for Airport Ground Handling Simulator VR delayed, and why is this actually a good thing…

Hello everyone, we apologize for being silent for such a long time regarding the future of Airport Ground Handling Simulator VR. We were unable to share information until now, not because of any super-secrecy, but mostly because of the uneasy decision-making process and unpredictable R&D process conducted over the last 6 months.

Let’s go back to August 2022, where it all started. From the beginning, the AGHS VR Steam release was a risky venture for us. Not only because putting a corporate product on a consumer platform for gamers sounds crazy, but mostly because the idea was to create a separate business line generating extra revenue for the creation of new consumer-oriented scenarios (instead of adapting the existing corporate drills) and move towards a “true game” with continuous gameplay and other game-like features. In other words, our consumer development, at some point, must start working on its own and be cost-effective. It is not a secret, even for mainstream VR games (which AGHS is clearly not), it is not easy to pay off the development costs from a Steam VR release only. I’m not even saying that it is unlikely to happen for very niche products like ours. Despite all fears and concerns, we did it and we got two main outcomes:

1. The number of people interested in this very niche product is surprisingly high.
2. The financial results of our Steam VR release were not great enough to continue according to the approved plan.

Based on that, we started thinking about the further strategy. Of course, our main focus is corporate training, but we have fixed in our thoughts that the consumer market is also very important for us. We definitely see a synergy from being presented in both worlds. For example, it is exciting to see how Steam, a consumer platform, is now playing a role of a powerful B2B marketing tool for us. Many of our potential clients are also gamers in everyday life. It is so cool that they can test our product at home without filling an official request and all the corporate bureaucracy. Also, gamers are the best when it comes to honest and comprehensive feedback on your product, and they have the time and courage to get to the farthest corners and pull out all the imperfections and bugs, which is very important for us.

So, in September 2022, it started to be clear that staying within the PCVR platform only is not the way to go. Meanwhile, many people were constantly asking about the Quest version, and another big group of people were complaining about the lack of a non-VR version. We thought, alright, if we set aside the non-VR version, which is completely out of our interest for now (also because it means that we need to redo the scenarios and rethink all interactions and probably kill all the fun), the solution was clear — we need to go to standalone VR platforms because they have a bigger player base. So easy to decide. So hard to make.

One of the greatest distinctions of our software is the highest realism and insane level of details. Everything that normal developers call “high-poly” is like a 2nd LOD for us. We work in a super-high-poly pipeline. For gamers, realism is a great part of fun along with the VR itself. Porting all this glory to the mobile VR platform and making it work at 72 fps and 200% resolution (yes, we really hate how shitty VR looks without 2x supersampling) was a hell of a technical challenge. When we started the R&D process in that direction, no one in our team was sure that we would succeed. That’s the main reason why we never announced that development. Who wants to announce future failures, haha.

After six months of hard work, we are excited to announce that our team has almost completed the development of the Android-based standalone VR version of our Ground Handling products. Although we couldn’t achieve the same picture quality as on PCVR, we have managed to make it as close as possible, and we are happy to share the first screenshot of AGHS running on Quest2.

Moving forward, we plan to support both PCVR and Android-based standalone VR platforms for all of our Ground Handling products and scenarios. We are planning to release our products on Quest AppLab, SideQuest, and PicoStore, with the App Lab release scheduled for the end of March 2023.
However, the development of the standalone version has delayed the adoption of other announced scenarios, such as Cargo operations and Pushback. The changes we made to the platform during the transition to a multi-platform solution affected several critical parts, including our VR interaction toolkit. We had to focus on finishing the changes in the core architecture before resuming work on the promised updates.

We are happy to announce that the core architecture work is almost finished, and we can very soon get back to the preparations of the promised updates. Although we cannot announce the exact release dates, we hope to release the updates soon.

In about a week or two, we are going to start the AGHS standalone beta test period. We will announce the new beta tester application submission shortly. If you have a Quest2 or Quest Pro, get prepared, and don’t forget to subscribe to our FB page, Twitter, or Discord updates.

We want to express our gratitude to all of our existing players and beta testers. Your patience and support have been invaluable and have made the impossible possible! ❤️