BUILD FASTER, EARN MORE

Forever Pets

How a Two-Person Studio shipped 25 VR Builds in 4 Weeks

This developer story is part of our Build Faster, Earn More series. Real playbooks on how to deploy the latest tools and engage with your audience on Meta Quest.

Game development is notoriously difficult. Building for VR introduces a unique set of iteration taxes that can slow down even the most experienced teams. For small independent studios, the challenge is rarely just engineering the game. The real hurdle is managing the additional steps like player onboarding, retention, and monetization.

Dr. Wendelin Reich, Founder and CEO of Virtual Beings, understands this friction. Alongside his wife, he formed the two-person team behind Forever Pets⁠, a VR pet simulator that has inspired a deeply passionate community. Their studio recently achieved a significant milestone, shipping 25 builds in just 4 weeks. They successfully overhauled their onboarding funnel, driving a measurable increase in revenue.

Identifying Friction: Why Traffic Doesn't Always Equal Conversion

When Forever Pets initially launched, the game experienced a surge of viral traffic driven by prominent content creators. However, the studio quickly realized that high download numbers were not translating into sustained revenue.

"We had a bunch of crisis meetings to decide what people were actually going to pay money for," Reich recalled. "We asked the question on our Discord, and the number one choice was cats. So we spent six weeks building the first version of the cats. People were buying them, but not enough. The conversion rate was not looking good."

The turning point came during a consultation with the Meta Horizon Start program and the Growth & Monetization team. The analytics team at Meta also helped identify the game's drop-off telemetry, revealing a leak in the first-time user experience.

"I basically had almost a panic attack after that call," Reich admitted. "I realized we had left so many players out there who never made it to the game. We had created so much friction and focused on the wrong things. If you drop half your players during the tutorial, you never get to retain them."

This realization forced a strategic pivot. Before the studio could optimize monetization, they had to fix onboarding. And to fix onboarding, they needed a better analytics infrastructure.

From Chatbots to the "Agent CEO"

Reich is a computer scientist with a background in social psychology, but he is the first to admit he is not a dedicated data scientist. To bridge this gap, he turned to AI.

While standard AI chatbots had previously provided a modest productivity boost, the introduction of autonomous AI agents fundamentally changed the studio's trajectory. Because agents can directly access source files, read documentation, and drill into Unity configurations, they eliminate the friction of manual context sharing.

"Agents literally tripled my productivity overnight," Reich explained. "It was no comparison… I just have to be the CEO."

Reich advises other small developers to adopt this "Agent CEO" mindset. When confronted with a complex problem like instrumenting custom analytics or writing advanced SQL queries, developers should act as the executive directing a virtual team.

"You need to know what you don't know, or at least be honest about what you don't know," he noted. "Be able to question yourself, externalize those doubts, hand them off to the agent, and treat them as a sparring partner."

While Virtual Beings built their agent workflow with third party tools, Meta has since launched Horizon debug bridge (Hzdb). Hzdb gives both you and your LLM access to our knowledge base, your headset, Quest developer tools, performance trace analysis, the Meta 3D asset library and more. You can read more in the first entry in the Build Faster, Earn More Series.

The Forever Pets Analytics Stack

To achieve their rapid iteration cadence, Virtual Beings built a layered analytics stack that balances real-time responsiveness with deep, compound querying capabilities. They migrated to Firebase Analytics and GA4, then connected it to BigQuery to enable arbitrary SQL queries over raw event streams.

Tool	Primary Function	Studio Use Case
Meta Developer Dashboard	High-level telemetry and real-time responsiveness	Checked multiple times daily for immediate performance signals and baseline drop off triangulation.
Firebase & Google Analytics	Foundational event tracking	Free, high-bandwidth storage for standard game events and session data.
BigQuery Intraday Streaming	Complex custom querying	Used to answer compound questions and provide a same day feedback loop for build assessment.
Discord Exception Hook	Real time bug triage	Every game-side error streams to a private Discord channel, alerting the team to undefined states within 30 seconds.
Modal	Bespoke backend patching	Used to deploy rapid, custom fixes, gifts, and refunds for individual player edge cases without requiring a full client update.

This stack enables a remarkably tight iteration loop. When the team pushes a new build, they monitor the Meta dashboard for immediate data. Thirty minutes later, an AI agent runs a predefined "health check" recipe against the BigQuery intraday stream. If the Discord hook begins lighting up with new error messages, the team triages the issue, uses the AI agent to author a fix, and pushes a new build.

"When we push a build, we're always nervous because that's the moment the rubber hits the road," Reich said. "But Claude Code tells us what to do, half an hour later we have the build, we push it, and this is super fast and smooth with Meta. Another 20 minutes later, it's out, and the error just dies out."

Instrumenting Emotional Beats

Standard analytics funnels often fail to capture the nuance of a VR pet simulator. Generic metrics like session length cannot explain why a player loves their virtual animal. To solve this, Virtual Beings rolled out custom events, custom dimensions, and user properties to track "emotional beats", the micro-interactions that transform a casual player into a retained one. Once you capture your game's "Aha moment" through this telemetry, you can engineer your game loop to repeat it. For Forever Pets, the data revealed that players who experienced three or more emotional beats in their first session were significantly more likely to return the next day.

"You feed your pet, you make the pet happy, you make yourself happy," Reich explained. "The way our tech works is that the pet will notice a moving toy and pay attention to it. That's a small emotional beat. You buy a little cowboy hat, you put it on the table, and the bird reacts. These are the kinds of things you instrument."

Defining these events requires careful engineering. For example, tracking when a player starts caressing a pet is straightforward, but detecting when they stop is an undefined state. Reich used his AI agents to proactively search the codebase and determine the correct signals to log these complex interactions without blowing up their bandwidth.

Authentic Monetization and the Empathy Mandate

The studio's approach to monetization is deeply rooted in their core audience of pet lovers. By modeling their in-app purchases on the real world economy of pet ownership, they created an authentic free-to-play economy. Players understand that caring for a pet involves investing in their happiness and Virtual Beings translated that natural dynamic into the game.

"We charge you for making your pet extra happy with premium food or toys." Reich explained. This focus on positive reinforcement ensures that monetization feels like a natural extension of the care-taking experience rather than a transactional hurdle.

This empathy extends to their design philosophy. Reich believes that while data is essential, it must be balanced with a clear player-first vision. He encourages developers to hypothesize and design with intention, ensuring that every optimization serves the long term health of the community.

"I want my players to love the game now, in five years, and in ten years," Reich noted. "We hypothesize, but we're also humble. We over-instrument because it's cheap, but we always put the players first."

The results of this empathy-first approach are tangible. Virtual Beings shared that approximately 8% of the game's 1,300 reviews explicitly mention mental health, well-being, or stress relief. In one instance, the team used their Modal backend to spend two hours writing a bespoke fix to restore a daily streak for an 11-year-old player who had accidentally missed a day.

"It just warms my heart to know that out there are people who feel a little bit better every day thanks to Forever Pets," Reich shared.

Measurable Growth and the Playbook for Meta VR Developers

The rigorous build, measure, learn cycle paid off. Between February and March of 2026, Virtual Beings deployed load time reductions, a main menu bypass, and a simplified first-time user experience. They also introduced a try on drop system and a multi armed bandit algorithm to automate A/B testing for impulse purchases.

The impact was clear and verified. Data from Virtual Beings showed the gameplay conversion increased from roughly 51% to 78%. Monthly in-app purchase conversion improved from 1.46% to 1.99%, representing a 36% relative increase. Overall monthly active users expanded by 17%.

Next Steps for Any Indie Studio

Key takeaways for any game studio:

Build Faster

Adopt the "Agent CEO" mindset: Enable AI agents to search your codebase and write SQL queries autonomously. To get started with agentic tooling for VR, read more from our Build Faster, Earn More series.

Build a Real-Time Triage Loop: Route game exceptions to a Discord webhook and the Meta Analytics Dashboard for immediate feedback. Use this real-time pulse to catch and patch undefined states before they impact thousands of players.

Earn More

Fix onboarding first: Observe friction empirically via data, and don't attempt to optimize monetization if your tutorial is leaking players. Explore more onboarding best practices to boost retention and nail your first-time user experience.

Instrument emotional beats, not just generic funnels: Identify the core emotional interactions that create engaged players and build custom telemetry to track them.

"Game development is hard," Reich concluded. "Let's make it a little less hard."

To learn more about how Meta can help your studio grow, explore the resources available through the Meta Developer Start program. Read more about the Build Faster, Earn More series here and follow us on X⁠ and Facebook⁠ for all of the latest updates.