Virtuix, the company building the Omni VR treadmill, announced a partnership with Chinese game publisher and eSports company Hero Entertainment. The collaborative effort will convert China’s most popular mobile FPS game, Crisis Action, into an active VR experience for the Chinese and U.S. markets.
Hero Entertainment operates an affiliate company called Hero Sports that runs a large professional mobile eSports league in China called Hero Pro League. Hero Sports intends to add "Active VR" to the Hero Pro League this year with Crisis Action and the Virtuix Omni treadmill.
“We believe that virtual reality will take off faster and become bigger in China than anywhere else,” said Jan Goetgeluk, Virtuix’s founder, and CEO. “With the Hero deal, we are teaming up with China’s premier FPS developer. Their content combined with our Omni motion platform provides an unbeatable Active VR experience that we predict will take the China market by storm.”
Goetgeluk has good reason to believe that China will be a large market for his company. To date, Virtuix has pre-sold a little more than 5,000 units through its Kickstarter campaign and direct sales through its own website. The partnership with Hero Entertainment has already garnered the company a major contract that will more than double the company’s current sales. UNIS, a Chinese supplier of amusement machines, intends to purchase between 5,000 and 10,000 units this year to sell to arcades and entertainment centers across China. That number just scratches the surface of the potential for Virtuix in China. There are over 140,000 internet cafes in the country, and many of them will embrace VR in the coming years.
Virtuix also announced that Leyard, a company from Beijing that sells equipment to entertainment centers, shopping malls and theme parks, made a large $500,000 investment into the company. Virtuix is in the process of raising funds through a Series A mini-IPO campaign, which has raised over $6 million so far. The Series A round is open to the public, but it wraps up at the end of the month, so there's no much time left.
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