A VR game is a video game played inside a virtual reality headset: the screens fill the player's view, and turning the head or moving the hands steers the action. Brands run VR games at events and in shops, where one headset holds a visitor's full attention, and release them in headset app stores.
How it works
A VR game runs on virtual reality hardware, usually a headset, often with a controller in each hand (Wikipedia). The headset tracks your head, so you look around a world instead of at a screen, while your hands grab, throw and steer. Some headsets, such as Meta's Quest 2, need no PC; others are tethered to one, which is why Renault's pit crews below wore backpack computers.
Moving is the hard part. You play in a cleared area marked out with Meta's boundary system, or ride a virtual vehicle: Netflix's Eden Unearthed kept a motorbike cockpit in view and darkened the edges of the picture in sharp turns to limit motion sickness, UploadVR noted. Event builds add real props, like the sensor-fitted bat in the Dodgers game below. A run ends with a score, a time or a place on a leaderboard.
Where brands use it
Car makers use VR for experiential marketing at motor shows and in showrooms. On Nissan's Paris Motor Show stand, visitors wearing an Oculus Rift slid their feet across a platform to chase a Juke in Chase The Thrill; Audi's Norwegian dealers saw 57% more visitors on the days its Enter Sandbox VR drive was in store, according to the case study. Verizon brought 5G QB to Super Bowl LIVE. In 2021 the U.S. Air Force toured a boom operator's pod to recruit. Film and TV studios release VR games for fans, and Sephora showed an Apple Vision Pro game at VivaTech 2024. Browse the AR and VR and Installation facets, or the Installations collection.
When it fits
VR suits a brief whose point is a feeling, a skill or a scale a flat screen can't carry: the pressure of a pit stop, a 100-mph fastball, a job a recruit has never seen. The audience must already gather in one place or own a headset. Meta suggests newcomers start short, for example 30 minutes, then a 15-minute break. Brand sessions are shorter: just over two minutes for the Air Force's special-warfare firefight, about ten for the Dodgers' batting game. Plan throughput: at ten minutes a turn, one headset serves six players an hour, so scarcity can be sold, as the Dodgers' VR ticket was. A free store release extends an event build: DHL's Box Stacker Pro moved from live events to Steam and the Meta Quest store.
When not to use it
Don't use VR for reach. IDC's July 2026 forecast puts mixed-reality headsets, anchored by Meta's Quest line, at 3.2 million units in 2026; it counted 1.26 billion smartphones shipped in 2025. For a mass audience, build a web game or an AR game. On a crowded stand, a motion-controlled game needs no headset, and the crowd sees what the player sees. Skip VR for young children: Meta sets a minimum age of 10 and asks parents to supervise. Platforms and builds disappear. Google discontinued its Daydream View headset in 2019 and stopped selling Cardboard in 2021. Warner Bros.' Dunkirk WebVR is offline, and the servers of ASICS's Quest game DISC shut down in April 2026. A 360-degree film people only watch is a video, not a game we list.
Examples from the library
VR Real Data Baseball — Dodgers (2025)
Agency: Bascule Inc. · Platform: VR installation at the Dodgers Experience exhibition, Tokyo
Visitors chose to bat or catch, put on a headset and picked up a real bat or catcher's mitt fitted with motion sensors. At home plate in a virtual stadium they faced Shohei Ohtani or Yoshinobu Yamamoto, every pitch rebuilt from official MLB data, so fastballs topped 100 mph and breaking balls moved more than 60 cm. After each pitch, a trail showed the bat's path against the ball.
Result: The first batch of Legend Passes, the 8,000-yen ticket with VR access, sold out on the first day of sale, Mynavi News reported; Bascule says the attraction appeared on more than 20 TV and YouTube programmes.
Pitstop Challenge — Renault (2017)
Agency: We Are Social, Backlight · Platform: Four-player VR installation at Formula 1 races
Four players put on HTC Vive headsets with backpack PCs and shared one tracked space, each seeing the others as Renault Sport pit mechanics in team overalls. After a tutorial and a practice stop came the live run: time slowed as the crew entered "the Zone", the campaign's word for total focus, and they changed the car's wheels as fast as they could. Controls were simple enough for first-timers.
Result: By June 2017 more than 800 people had played it on circuits around the world, Sportsmarketing.fr reported (in French), and it was set to run all season.
Eden Unearthed — Netflix (2021)
Agency: Monks · Platform: Meta Quest
Players ride a futuristic motorbike across the cel-shaded world of Netflix's anime series Eden. They steer around obstacles and collect apples as fuel; landmarks trigger short narrated scenes from the show's backstory. The run ends when the fuel does, and the distance goes to a global leaderboard. A Netflix spokesperson told Engadget the marketing team made it to promote the series.
FAQ
Is VR still popular?
It is a niche. Meta shipped 1.7 million Quest headsets in the first three quarters of 2025, down 16% year on year, according to IDC figures reported by The Register. IDC expects smart glasses to displace VR and mixed-reality headsets as the market's growth engine. For brands, VR works best where you hand out the headset yourself.
What is the difference between a VR game and an AR game?
A VR game replaces what you see with a computer-made world: the WebXR standard gives a VR session exclusive use of the headset's display. An AR game lays graphics over the real room, usually through a phone camera, as AR lenses do. AR runs on phones people already carry; VR needs a headset but shuts out everything else.
Can you play VR games in a browser?
Yes, in browsers that support the WebXR Device API. MDN marks it as experimental, with limited availability and HTTPS required, so test on the headsets your audience owns. Portals such as heyVR host browser VR games, and in 2017 Dunkirk WebVR let two players escape Dunkirk together in Chrome on their phones.