X8: a 5v5 VR shooter where a standalone headset and a GTX 1080 share the same match
Thirdverse's free-to-play hero shooter, live on Steam, Meta Quest and Pico since 9 November 2023 and past 650,000 downloads. We built the engineering on Unreal Engine 5 — networking, backend, matchmaking, anti-cheat, economy, live operations and store certification — with four engineers over about eighteen months. The art, the game design and the rendering were Thirdverse's, and this page is careful about which half is which.
What a reader can check
And, just as usefully, what they cannot.
X8 is a live free-to-play product on three VR storefronts. Anyone can install it today and play the thing this page describes, which is a better standard of evidence than a portfolio screenshot. What nobody can check from a storefront is our name — Thirdverse, Co., Ltd. is developer and publisher of record on all three, as is normal for contracted engineering. The project is named here with Thirdverse's permission; the split of work described below rests on our word, and the rest of this page is written so you can see exactly where that word starts.
What is checkable, as of 12 September 2026: the Steam listing, free to play, released 9 November 2023, holding Very Positive — 81% of 196 reviews, tagged Cross-Platform Multiplayer, with a listed minimum of an Intel Core i7-6700 and a GTX 1080. On Meta Quest the current listing is X8 Contra: Super Wall Storm, released 12 December 2024, 4.7 from 120 ratings, a 2.65 GB download running on Quest 2, 3, 3S and Pro. The game ships in eight languages with full English audio, and there is a Pico listing as well.
And the part a portfolio page would usually leave out. There is a second Quest listing, X8 Japan Only Version, region-restricted and holding 3.6 from 17 ratings — a far worse number than the 4.7 above it, from a much smaller sample, on a page that was superseded when the Contra collaboration moved the game to a new global listing. Both are linked below. Quoting only the 4.7 would be choosing a number rather than reporting one.
The 650,000 downloads figure is Thirdverse's own, from their press release of 5 December 2024 announcing the Contra: Operation Galuga collaboration with Konami. It is their number, published by them, and it is quoted here rather than estimated.
Open the Steam listing → · Meta Quest listing → · The Japan-only listing → · The game's own site →
X8 project snapshot
One product, three storefronts, and a work split that is worth stating precisely.
What the product is
A free-to-play 5v5 VR hero shooter from Thirdverse, Co., Ltd. of Tokyo. Hero abilities, a weapon and item loadout, an attack-and-defend Demolition mode, cosmetic purchases, and cross-platform play between standalone headsets and PC VR.
What our work covered
Every engineering system in the product, on Unreal Engine 5: client code, networking, backend and live service, matchmaking, anti-cheat, the free-to-play economy and store, build and release pipeline, and certification on each storefront. Four engineers, about eighteen months of active development, under contract directly with the developer.
What was not ours
Game design, art and rendering. Thirdverse designed the game and made everything you look at, and graphics optimisation sat on their side of the line too. The frame rate X8 holds on a standalone headset is their achievement, and this page does not borrow it.
Ten players, two very different machines
Three constraints, all of them readable off the store listing before a line of code is written.
A phone chip and a GTX 1080, in one match
Steam's listed minimum is an i7-6700 with a GTX 1080, on mains power. A Quest 2 is a self-contained headset on a mobile processor and a battery. Cross-Platform Multiplayer is on the Steam feature list, which means those two have to agree on one match state continuously — and neither can be trusted to decide it. One Unreal Engine 5 codebase covers both, so there is no lighter second version to hide the difference in.
Competitive means authoritative
A 5v5 shooter with a leaderboard and an attack-defend objective mode is a game people try to cheat. Every shot, position and score has to be settled somewhere a player cannot reach, and settled fast enough that a headset tracking someone's hands at room scale still feels immediate.
Free to play, in eight languages, on three stores
Free-to-play moves the economy, the store and account handling from side features to load-bearing ones. Eight languages and three storefronts — Steam, Meta and Pico — each with its own accounts, entitlements, build format and certification queue, multiply every release by the number of places it has to land.
The half of a game nobody screenshots
Everything below is a system we owned end to end on this project.
Client systems, on Unreal Engine 5
The game code underneath Thirdverse's design and art: heroes and their abilities, the weapon and item loadout, the match and round flow, and the interface tying them together. Their design document and their assets; our implementation of both, in a single Unreal Engine 5 codebase serving standalone headsets and PC VR alike — not a port and a parent, one product with two very different machines inside it.
Networking
The part that makes a crossplay shooter possible at all: one authoritative match state, replicated to ten players on hardware that ranges from a desktop GPU to a battery-powered headset, over whatever connection each of them happens to have.
Backend and live service
The servers behind the game and the operational work of keeping them up after launch — accounts, progression, sessions, and the day-to-day of running a product that has been live since November 2023 rather than shipped and handed over.
Matchmaking
Building ten-player matches out of whoever is online across three storefronts and several device classes. We publish no figures for this system — the numbers belong to the client and permission to quote them was not given, so they are absent rather than approximated.
Anti-cheat
A free-to-play competitive shooter has no purchase barrier in front of a bad actor, so a banned account costs nothing to replace. That shifts the work towards what the server can verify on its own rather than what the client reports about itself.
Economy, store and releases
The free-to-play economy and in-game store, including the cosmetic purchases and paid DLC the storefronts list, plus the build pipeline and certification on Steam, Meta and Pico — three review processes, on three calendars, for one game.
We did not draw a single pixel
The work split was the defining fact of this project, so it gets a section rather than a footnote.
Most outsourcing is a slice: a feature, a platform, a team topped up for a quarter. X8 was a different shape. Thirdverse kept the two things a studio's identity actually lives in — what the game is, and what it looks like — and handed over everything that makes it run. Design and art in, working live product out, with four engineers on our side of the line.
That shape has a real advantage and a real cost, and both are worth naming. The advantage is that a four-person team can carry a live competitive multiplayer product, which would be implausible if the same four people also had to build the renderer and the content pipeline. The cost is that we cannot claim the thing people notice first. When someone puts on a headset and says X8 looks good and runs smoothly on a standalone device, that is Thirdverse's work, and a page of ours that let you assume otherwise would be taking credit for it.
So the claim here is narrower and, we think, more useful to anyone deciding who to hire: the systems that decide whether a multiplayer game works are separable from the ones that decide whether it is beautiful, and they can be contracted separately. X8 is the evidence that the split holds up across eighteen months of build and nearly three years of live operation.
Multiplayer backend · Game development · Hire game backend engineers
From build to three years live
The dates here are public ones. Where a date is arithmetic rather than a record, it says so.
Around the middle of 2022 — the build starts
This one is derived, not published: about eighteen months of active development counted back from a 9 November 2023 release puts the start of the work around May 2022. Four engineers, against a design and an art pipeline owned by the client.
9 November 2023 — release
X8 goes live free-to-play on Steam and Meta Quest on the same day, in eight languages, with cross-platform play between PC VR and standalone headsets. Pico follows on the same product.
The service starts the day the build stops
A competitive free-to-play game is not finished at release, it is opened. Backend, matchmaking, anti-cheat and the store move from being built to being run, which is a different job with a different failure mode.
5 December 2024 — past 650,000 downloads
Thirdverse publishes the figure in the press release announcing the Contra collaboration. Thirteen months after launch, on a product still being updated.
12 December 2024 — Contra: Operation Galuga
A collaboration with Konami's Contra brings Bill and Lance into X8 and moves the game onto a new global Meta Quest store page. This one is the product's history rather than a claim of ours — it lands thirteen months past the release the eighteen months above were counted to.
12 September 2026 — still live
Very Positive on Steam at 81% of 196 reviews, 4.7 from 120 ratings on the current Quest listing, still free, still crossplay. Nearly three years of uptime on systems a four-person team built.
The part worth holding onto is the ratio: four engineers, about eighteen months, for a live competitive multiplayer product across three storefronts and eight languages. That is only possible because the split was clean. A team that also had to own the renderer, the art pipeline and the game design would have needed to be several times the size, and most of the schedule risk on this project came from the storefront calendars rather than from the engineering.
What this page does not claim
The absent claims are absent on purpose.
We do not claim the art, the game design or the rendering. All three were Thirdverse's. That includes graphics optimisation, which means the frame rate X8 holds on a standalone headset is not our result and is not offered here as one. The screenshot at the top of this page is their art, and the section below says where it came from.
We publish no matchmaking figures. Not queue times, not match counts, not concurrency. Those numbers exist and they are the client's; permission to quote them was not given, so this page has a gap where a more careless one would have an estimate.
We are not credited on any storefront. Thirdverse, Co., Ltd. is developer and publisher of record on Steam, Meta and Pico. A reader can verify the product, its ratings, its dates and its download figure; they cannot verify our role in it from a public source, and this page says so in its first section rather than hoping nobody checks.
The May 2022 start date is arithmetic, not a record. It is eighteen months counted back from a published release date. The release date is Thirdverse's, the duration is ours, and the subtraction is stated openly so it can be corrected rather than read as a filed fact.
The ratings, dates, sizes and download figure are not ours. The 81% of 196 and the i7-6700/GTX 1080 minimum are Steam's; the 4.7 from 120, the 3.6 from 17, the 2.65 GB and the supported-headset list are Meta's; the 650,000 downloads and the 12 December 2024 collaboration date are Thirdverse's own press release. All read on 12 September 2026, because a number a reader cannot trace back is a number they should not have to believe.
The performance figures elsewhere on this site belong to other projects. The 52,000 and 39,000 peak concurrent player figures in our multiplayer game backend and Metarun case studies are different titles on different infrastructure. None of them are X8's, and X8 contributes no concurrency figure of its own to this site.
The picture behind the title is not ours. It is one of the screenshots on X8's own Steam store listing, cropped and nothing else. X8 was designed, art-directed and published by Thirdverse, Co., Ltd.: the game and its art are theirs, the engineering described above is the work.
What does a VR multiplayer game cost to build?
Scoped per project rather than banded, and here is what the scoping actually turns on.
We publish price bands for the work whose shape repeats — a multiplayer backend build runs $40,000–$90,000 priced by development time, and the bands for AI and SaaS work sit on the pricing page. A full VR multiplayer product is not banded, because the single biggest variable is not technical at all: it is how much of the game the client already owns.
What we can publish is the shape of this one: four engineers, about eighteen months, for every engineering system in a free-to-play 5v5 crossplay shooter — with design, art and rendering supplied by the client. Move that line and the number moves with it. A studio arriving with a design document and no art pipeline is a different project from Thirdverse's, and pricing the two the same would be dishonest in one direction or the other.
The four things that actually move a quote of this kind, in the order they move it: where the work split falls, because art and rendering are a team of their own; whether the game is competitive, since an authoritative server and real anti-cheat are the difference between a multiplayer feature and a multiplayer product; how many storefronts ship it, each adding accounts, entitlements, a build target and a certification queue; and how long it stays live, because the service after launch is a running cost and not a delivery.
Every band we publish, and the ones we do not · Multiplayer backend · Game backend engineers
Common questions
What studios ask before contracting the engineering half of a game.
Have the design and the art, need the game to run?
Tell us where your line falls. We will tell you what the engineering half actually costs, which systems have to be authoritative, and how many storefronts your calendar is really answering to — before the schedule depends on the answer.
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