Dec 11, 2025

VAIL VR (Part One): From Couch Surfing to $15M in Crowdfunding

This is Part One of a two-part series following AEXLAB’s shift from a bootstrapped premium title into a hybrid economy. Part Two, coming soon, will dive into the company’s community-driven live operations.

When developer AEXLAB officially launched VAIL VRon the Meta Horizon Store in February 2024, it looked like nothing could go wrong. The tactical shooter debuted at a premium $29.99 USD after a full seven years of development, bolstered in part by a die-hard community of beta testers on Discord. Early reviews were strong if not glowing. UGC clips made the rounds on social media. And the game steadily climbed the charts. By all accounts, the launch looked like proof that an indie team could hold its own against competitors with much deeper pockets.

But the picture inside the studio was much more complicated.

VAIL was “crushing it” in terms of reviews with players and critics, but it was impossible for the team to ignore the reality at hand: the title was not reaching the critical mass of players it needed to sustain the rising server costs of the game’s live service. Something had to give.

“We had a really good game. Everyone loved it. We just weren’t getting that many people, and we realized we needed a bigger funnel,” says Chandler Efros, AEXLAB’s lead producer and designer.

What followed was a calculated reworking of the game’s premium model in favor of a tiered funnel, one designed to capture the players the paywall had excluded. For developers, AEXLAB’s story serves as a fascinating case study of how to pivot your game’s economic engine, in real-time, to adapt to evolving player expectations.

How Two Brothers Bootstrapped a Competitive VR Shooter

AEXLAB began as the brainchild of brothers Albert and Jonathan Ovadia, with the company actively taking shape inside Albert’s Miami home where Jonathan couch-surfed during college. While the brothers experimented with early VR prototypes in Unreal, the spark for VAIL arrived when Albert built a rudimentary gray-box demo with a few moving targets and blocky placeholder guns.

With this simple demo, the aim and feel of the weapons clicked in a way the duo had never experienced in VR before. There was something special here; it had the makings of a shooter that could hold its own against much larger franchises. With more time and money, the brothers thought, this could be big.

And time they had. But initially, AEXLAB operated without any outside funding to speak of, or even any formal game development experience for that matter. When the funding they did have ran out, they borrowed from friends and family to cover expenses and get grassroots efforts rolling. Soon, Albert and Jonathan had recruited a small team (friends they met inside of other shooters) to join them as testers, with weekly sessions regularly breaking the build and surfacing issues.

But despite the game’s early flaws, testers kept coming back. The bones were solid. This validation was huge for Albert and Jonathan, proving to the brothers that VAIL, even in its nascent form, had potential. With a working demo and early traction from loyal testers, the brothers turned toward the next step: finding funding.

Raising Capital and Cementing the Premium-First Strategy

With this momentum, the team decided it was time to begin pitching investors. The response, unfortunately, was always the same: venture firms flagged the brothers’ first-time developer status; questioned their lack of ties to Silicon Valley; and cited the financial challenge of bankrolling a multiplayer game.

The turning point came when they discovered StartEngine, an equity crowdfunding platform where any retail investor, not just accredited investors, could buy shares in startups. The opportunity was tempting, but not without its risks: a failed campaign raise could set development back years, if not derail it entirely.

Disclaimer: Investing in securities is speculative. Meta is not affiliated with StartEngine, nor does it endorse any of its products.

But Albert and Jonathan knew something the VCs didn’t: where venture capital saw “first-time developers,” the players themselves saw a competitive shooter worth hundreds of hours of their time. The community’s intense engagement in early tournaments and testing sessions gave the brothers the sense of demand they needed to take the leap into crowdfunding.

But there was of course the matter of the platform’s $10,000 application fee, which, after some searching, Jonathan was able to borrow from his mother. The team dove into building out the marketing assets for the campaign, and when their StartEngine page went live weeks later, the AEXLAB community responded immediately by investing roughly one million dollars. With the studio’s first real runway in place, the brothers could now get to work on delivering the game’s early promise.

Players already invest their most valuable commodity, which is time, so cash-for-equity really does make fundamental sense. We feel grateful to have our actual players as shareholders.

Jonathan Ovadia, Co-founder & CEO, AEXLAB

This first round of funding on StartEngine arguably had the biggest impact on AEXLAB’s trajectory, mainly because it proved the demand for the product while also giving early supporters a stake in the company’s success. This created the added snowball effect of bringing venture partners who had previously passed on the project back into the fold. In fact, according to AEXLAB’s crowdfunding page, the company reports raising more than $15 million in total funding from venture capital and retail investors as of writing, making it one of the most successfully funded VR studios on the StartEngine platform.

Now, with years of infrastructure-building behind them and a core community in place, Albert and Jonathan could focus on VAIL itself, further iterating on the game’s mechanics and weapon handling while scaling the experience they’d worked so hard to create. Finally, it was time for the fun part: launching VAIL on the Meta Horizon Store as the premium title they, and their community, had envisioned all along.

Navigating the Shift from Premium to Hybrid

For a moment, the VAIL launch felt like the payoff Albert and Jonathan had chased for years. VAIL hit the Meta Horizon Store as a full-price competitive shooter, players who regularly purchased premium VR titles understood the value and bought in, and longtime testers finally could own the game they had been pushing through builds for years.

Co-founders Albert and Jonathan Ovadia recruited a small but dedicated team of testers to help them refine early versions of VAIL.

But once VAIL settled into the store charts, the team’s feedback loop on Discord surfaced a different pattern. Many younger players bounced between several games in short bursts and judged them by how quickly they could get into a match. Because VAIL required an upfront purchase, that group often left before they understood what the game actually offered. As Chandler explains, “On Quest you kind of want to try the free stuff first. There are so many good free games that people ask, ‘Why pay for a game?’”

That left VAIL with a healthy but narrow premium audience that couldn’t support long-term growth. Social clips and strong reviews validated the game’s appeal, but the $29.99 price tag remained a hard barrier to entry. Many players saw that number and stepped away before giving VAIL a real chance. To reach that broader audience, AEXLAB would need a way for players to try the game without paying upfront.

💡Key insight for teams rethinking premium-only launches

Premium pricing can prove demand for your game, but it can also cap how many players will try it.

When a premium launch underperforms, break the situation into two questions:

✔️ Do players who get inside stay engaged?

✔️ Are enough new players getting through the door at all?

For more information on choosing a monetization approach, our articles on Premium and Free-to-Play models outline the key tradeoffs and pitfalls to consider.

Testing the Free-to-Play Funnel

The AEXLAB team knew the premium model worked for committed players, but they also understood that VAIL needed a smoother first step for newcomers if they were going to solve their player count issues. This drove them to introduce the Citadel, the game’s social hub inside the existing premium game. The goal with Citadel was simple: to understand how a wider range of players might explore VAIL and what types of activities drew them in.

“We decided to introduce the Citadel, which is basically just like a playground. You can do hockey, basketball, mini-games, you know, go mining, free for all, all these things,” Jonathan explains.

Citadel gave the team a straightforward way to watch early behavior. Once players loaded in, they could move at their own pace, and the team could see which parts of the world pulled them in. The plan worked, exposing the fact that many newcomers judged the whole game based on what they saw in the Citadel, which led them to think VAIL was a social hangout space instead of a tactical shooter. The team began hearing feedback like, “We love VAIL, but we thought it was a first-person shooter in VR. I get here and there is no team deathmatch. It feels more like an MMO with random mini-games. This is not what I expected.”

Regardless, Citadel still worked the way it was meant to. It gave social players a place to gather and kept the competitive experience intact for people who had bought the game. What became clear, though, was that many newcomers needed more guidance on what VAIL actually offered, since the first session was shaping expectations in ways that did not match the core tactical shooter experience. The team could see that better onboarding was the only way to fix that, and they also understood that none of this solved the larger growth problem. AEXLAB still needed a top-of-funnel that removed the purchase barrier, taught the basics first, and guided players into the heart of the game.

This pushed the team toward their biggest shift yet.

AEXLAB moved the entire first step of the experience to free-to-play, a calculated risk they felt prepared to take after months of watching early behavior in Citadel. The base download and Citadel became free starting points, while VAIL Combat shifted into a paid DLC on top. The huge bet paid off: transitioning to free-to-play saw new user acquisition in November 2024 increase by nearly 11x, catapulting the user base from tens of thousands of users to hundreds of thousands in a single month. Another surprising side effect was that retention actually improved with this influx of new players, with second week retention effectively increasing from just under 27% in October 2024 to over 38% in November 2024. Taken together, these results reinforced a simple lesson for the team, which Chandler sums up in the quote below.

If you have a great game, going free to play is just going to make it better. If you have a bad game, going free to play is going to make it worse.

Chandler “Panda” Efros, Lead Producer & Designer, AEXLAB

💡Key insight for teams building free social hubs

The first free touchpoint sets what players think your game is.

If the free layer focuses on side activities or social spaces, many players will assume that is the whole product and never move toward the core mode you want them to understand.

To keep that model aligned:

✔️ Design free experiences that teach the basics of your main mode first, then let hubs and mini-games reinforce that loop.

✔️ Look closely at your D0 retention data to see whether new players stick or bounce, and confirm whether you are setting the right expectations about your game.

Is free-to-play the right experience for your title? Learn how to calculate growth projections with our Transitioning to Free-to-Play article.

Building Training Grounds as the Core First Time User Experience Funnel

Citadel made the remaining gap easy to see. It helped players explore the world and spend time with friends, yet many new players still reached the hub before they had any sense of VAIL as a tactical shooter. The team needed a clearer first step that showed how the guns felt, how matches flowed, and why VAIL was worth learning, instead of asking players to infer that from a social space.

To understand how new players were experiencing these moments, one of AEXLAB’s engineers started hauling a headset out to college clubs and handing it to people who had never touched VR in their lives. He watched them fumble reloads, miss simple jumps, and get lost in interactions that made perfect sense to the team but none at all to a first-timer. Seeing the game break in front of strangers was uncomfortable, but it gave the team a clear picture of what needed fixing and what needed teaching.

The answer became Training Grounds, a structured combat mode introduced in the VAIL 1.5 update. Training Grounds sits at the center of the first-time user experience (FTUE) funnel inside VAIL’s hybrid model: players download the game, finish a short tutorial, and then move into Training Grounds before they ever see the Citadel. As Jonathan describes it, “you get introduced to the training grounds, which is basically four small maps, [and] team deathmatch.”

VAIL accelerates player onboarding with a short tutorial and Training Grounds, a team deathmatch mode.

Training Grounds gave new players a controlled way to feel VAIL’s shooting and movement across four compact maps. Each map is small enough that players can learn the layout quickly, yet still plays like a real match, so the experience feels like a true slice of the full game rather than a stripped-down demo. Where Citadel offers an open mix of social and side activities, Training Grounds gives newcomers a direct introduction to VAIL Combat and brings the free experience in line with the heart of the game.

💡Key insight for teams structuring F2P onboarding

Free content should mirror the real game so your hybrid free-to-play funnel sets accurate expectations from the first session.

As best practice, consider:

✔️ Anchoring your first-time user experience (FTUE) funnel around a mode that uses the same core mechanics and pacing as your main competitive or narrative experience

✔️ Introducing social hubs and side activities after players have already experienced real combat or core loops

Refining Monetization through Direct Player Feedback

By the time Training Grounds was live, VAIL had shifted from a single premium product into a hybrid funnel. The free base game included the Citadel and Training Grounds, and VAIL Combat sat on top as a paid DLC with the full competitive experience. With that transition finished, the real challenge became figuring out how to support a larger audience without weakening the game’s DNA.

VAILs journey from premium title to hybrid free-to-play was key in attracting and retaining younger audiences.

The team started by watching what players actually did. "All of it was gut feeling from just playing," Jonathan remembers. "Community sentiment, whether it was in-game reviews, Discord, Reddit, just searching keywords, were very helpful." They built a simple feedback loop: ship ideas, watch how players reacted in game and in community channels, then keep what worked and scrap what didn't.

With that feedback loop in place, the team focused on smoothing the early-game path so more free players could start in Citadel or Training Grounds, then upgrade into VAIL Combat for $29.99.

To support that shift, they fine-tuned the store by:

Setting clear tiers for cosmetic items that matched what players were actually buying.

Removing the underperforming items and bundles that players consistently skipped.

Adjusting prices so that the value of each purchase was obvious.

From there, the team added utility items like the Mining Helmet and OREX Pickaxe that rewarded time in Citadel and Extraction, where players were already logging long sessions.

That groundwork paved the way for the next big monetization bet: the tiered VAIL Alliance subscription. VAIL Alliance offered ongoing perks like early access and recurring currency drops, which quickly grew into strong add-ons to the rest of the economy. As it turns out, subscriptions became a hit – internal analysis showed that subscriptions led to 30% net increase in revenue one month post-launch, and over 70% of subscription revenue came from the highest-priced tier, Onyx, at $39.99 (which included a 20%+ off discount in the first month).

The results validated the approach. In addition to overall net revenue jumping by 30% in the month post-launch, weekly active buyer rates increased by over 50% in the following months. It became abundantly clear that all of VAIL’s gargantuan efforts to refine the onboarding experience with the Citadel and ease players into the core experience with Training Grounds had paid off: a full 50% of subscriptions in the first month of launch came from newly acquired players, proving that newcomers were locked in with what VAIL had to offer.

Throughout this process, the team kept a simple principle in mind. “When you’re small and starting, what you need to do tends to be really obvious,” says Chandler. They watched how people played, fixed what was confusing, and built systems that made sense for the audience in front of them. The hybrid model grew from that rhythm, and by the end of this phase the business finally matched the strength of the game players already loved.

💡Key insight for teams evolving hybrid monetization

Player behavior and sentiment should shape how you layer new revenue systems on top of a working core game.

A clear funnel makes it easier to see which experiments lift engagement and which simply add noise.

To keep your economy healthy over time:

✔️ Combine qualitative signals such as reviews, Discord conversations, and direct playtests with basic analytics on how players move through your funnel.

✔️ Layer revenue streams such as DLC, cosmetics, utility items, and subscriptions so no single product has to carry the entire business on its own.

What to Expect in Part Two

AEXLAB’s story so far shows how a small VR studio can turn its community into investors and rebuild around a hybrid free-to-play structure that fits the Quest audience. Part One traced that path from early prototype to premium launch, and into the first wave of changes in onboarding and monetization.

In Part Two, coming soon, we pick up from that foundation and focus on what it takes to run that model over time. You’ll see how AEXLAB treats players as partners in the live game and how the team uses Discord and in-game tools to turn feedback into concrete updates. You’ll also see how Training Grounds, the revised FTUE funnel, analytics, and a steady update cadence support long term-retention and new modes such as Extraction.

Stay tuned for Part Two in the coming weeks!

Your Testing Ground Starts Here

VAIL’s success reveals what’s possible when you build fast, test relentlessly, and let your community help shape the product. If you're ready to follow in AEXLAB’s footsteps, the Meta Horizon Start program gives you resources to get started.

Dedicated support: Technical guidance from Meta staff and fellow developers who understand VR's unique challenges.

Development resources: Software credits and early product releases that accelerate your build cycle.

A global network: Connect with creators solving similar problems and participate in exclusive developer events.

Learn more and apply to Start today.

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