As part of the gamescom latam convention, we had the chance to talk with ARVORE’s CEO Ricardo Justus. His company is a Brazilian game developer with a heavy emphasis on VR projects and multiple awards for their releases, which include the Pixel Ripped series, YUKI, The Line and more recently a VR game based on the popular TV show The Boys.
[Hardcore Gamer] First, please introduce yourself to let everyone know who you are and what you do at ARVORE.
[Ricardo Justus] I’m Ricardo Justus, I founded ARVORE in 2017 with two other partners. We’re going to be 9 years old in June this year. I founded the studio initially as an immersive entertainment studio looking at virtual reality games. We’ve launched multiple titles across all VR platforms since then: Meta Quest, PlayStation VR, Steam VR, PICO, every single one.
We got global recognition, a bunch of awards, grew a lot as a company and now are working on a bunch of amazing games. Recently, we started exploring non-VR games as well, but we’re still doing VR games, we’re doing both things.
About myself, I come from film school in college and have an entertainment background. I worked on television in Brazil for 15 years and then left television to start a gaming company.
Why VR as a focus and the backbone of your company?
I love challenges and I love new technologies. Back in 2013, when the Oculus Rift Kickstarter happened, I bought a dev kit myself because I love gaming, new technologies, new forms of storytelling and communication. Even though I’m not a developer myself, I started exploring Unity games and all these things.
I was fascinated by it as a new medium. It’s different, it’s not the same as normal games, it’s not the same as traditional storytelling. I thought it was, and I still believe it is the future of entertainment, storytelling and computing. This was back in 2013, so I started researching and trying to understand how to tell stories in this medium.
I am also a huge RPG nerd. I love Dungeons & Dragons and tabletop RPGs and one thing that fascinates me about RPGs is that you create the world, and you bring people into that world using your imagination in that tabletop game. VR enables you to create worlds and bring people into those worlds almost in a physical sense, so it’s a technology that enables a different kind of storytelling which is something that fascinated me.
I was fascinated by it as a new medium. It’s different, it’s not the same as normal games, it’s not the same as traditional storytelling. I thought it was and I still believe it is the future of entertainment, storytelling and computing.
So I started researching and learning a lot over the years. By 2015, I was working at TV Record, which is a big television network here [in Brazil], and I was Director of Innovation. I was exploring the future of entertainment and all that, and I said I have to make a company about this because it’s so exciting, it’s a new medium and it sort of levels the playing level for everybody, because nobody has the recipe on how to do this.
So I said let’s do it, and we started recruiting people from the gaming industry, from television and film industry, artists and storytellers, putting everybody together to make something new. And that newness and innovative approach is what appealed to me and, even now that we’re exploring non-VR games, we still approach it trying to innovate on input, forms of gameplay and forms of interaction.
To me, this is what inspires me to tell stories and create something different. This is why we went for VR, right? I still believe it is the future. Yes, the industry is very challenging now for VR, but we have [found] success, we’ve grown the team to 130 people now. We just launched last month a game based on the TV show The Boys, which we did in a partnership with Sony Pictures and we’re doing pretty amazing projects. I’m still very much a believer in VR, even though it’s a challenging space. It’s growing, but it’s slower than people expect. Technology is always faster than you think, but slower than you expect.
With the culture that we built, we won many awards, we won an Emmy Award in 2020, we were DICE nominees for one of the games we made. I think the culture that made these good games in VR, the innovation and all that is the same that I can apply to [our] non-VR games as well, but we’re still doing VR and I believe in the long term of this technology.
What have been the biggest challenges in what ARVORE has done so far and your new projects?
Building a game studio in Brazil is challenging to start with, but with VR… VR is harder than normal games because there are technological constraints. The performance constraints on VR are really challenging, especially because now the main platform for VR is standalone devices like the [Meta] Quest.
It uses mobile chipsets, and you have to run the games at 90fps with stereoscopic rendering twice for both eyes. It’s really challenging to create good games under these constraints, but constraints also breed creativity.
Something we focused on a lot was being recognized by international partners and players. This is something I have worked very strongly since the beginning of the company. From the beginning, we tried to earn awards and recognition, which is something really important for a company in an emerging market to then be trusted by these major IPs we’re working on.
We’ve done multiple things with big IPs. We’ve worked with Meta in the Horizon Worlds platform, [where] we did the world for the TV show The Office and the world for Blumhouse Pictures Studios (which is a major horror film studio). Then we did The Boys, a major television property, with Sony Pictures.
To be trusted, you need that recognition. To earn that recognition, you need to make good games, and to make good games is really challenging. It’s a challenge on top of each other and compounding. I think we were able to navigate that and then on top of that make a game studio where we have an amazing talent team and let these talented artists and creators work but also make it a business.
A lot of studios either have the business side or the artists. Joining those things together is something we did successfully and we’re having success in this super challenging industry from Brazil, which is challenging in itself. That’s something I’m really proud of.
But there are constant challenges, like dealing with major IPs is a challenge in itself. The Boys was something we were really careful with. We worked directly with the show creators and writers to craft the story, so it’s an official story. The actors reprised their roles using their voices in the game. All of these things are a huge learning curve.
What would you say were the biggest challenges with IPs specifically?
You need to be very open because you don’t own it. We’ve done original games before. With the original games, you own everything, so you can do whatever you want. When you’re working with an IP, you can’t do whatever you want, obviously, and you don’t own the creation, but you own a big, important part of it.
Sony Pictures and the creators were great partners here. We respected them 100% when it was anything related to the show's universe and they respected us when it was something related to games because they’re TV creators, not game creators. That created a very good back-and-forth, but we have to be careful because sometimes a game decision may go against something that is important to the IP and vice versa (something important for the IP will not make a great game).
You have to be very careful to navigate that and create a good product. But we have a lot of passion in our studio, “created with passion” is one of our core values. It’s easier to craft with passion when you own everything because you can do whatever you want, but when you’re working with someone else’s IP, you still have to be passionate. And we love The Boys, we wouldn’t work on a project that we don’t love and engage with. But you have to mix that passion with the sensibilities of the partner.
We worked on this project for two and a half years. It was a huge learning on how to do it successfully. Working with IPs is a challenge in and of itself. We’re still doing original projects as well, we’re doing both things and, in our pipeline right now, we are doing a big IP game, but I can’t talk about what it is, and some original stuff.
Sony Pictures and the creators were great partners here. We respected them 100% when it was anything related to the show's universe and they respected us when it was something related to games because they’re TV creators, not game creators.
I believe in doing originals because it is very engaging and valuable if we get a successful original IP, but working with big IPs [from others] is amazing, especially for a Brazilian company. We don’t always have these opportunities to work with world-class IPs. I think it’s happening more and more, and I’m very happy. I love to do it and show other companies that you can work with world-known IPs from here.
I think Brazil is growing a lot as an emerging market both from the customer and industry sides. Rodrigo Terra, who is my co-founder, is the president of Abragames, does a lot of work to help make this industry happen here. When we started the company, I always said I hated the stray dog complex*.
Brazilians sometimes think that we are too scrappy to be able to compete on the world stage and I don’t believe that at all. I think Brazilians are super creative and super talented. Sometimes we lack the opportunities, but now with a fully digital world, distribution is digital, everything is digital, the opportunities exist. If you make the opportunities happen, you can do that kind of thing from here. Is it challenging? Yes, it’s challenging, but making games is challenging.
* Also known as mutt or mongrel complex, the term refers to a collective sentiment that makes Brazilians feel like their culture is somehow inferior to the rest of the world.
How did you get more talent, and how did the studio evolve from when you started to now?
When we started, we were like seven people. When I decided to start the company, I started talking to Rodrigo Terra, my co-founder, and the first thing we did was find people. That’s the key, right?
I had a lot of connections in the traditional entertainment world: television, artists, 3D artists and stuff like that. And Terra had a lot of connections in the game development world. So we started informally recruiting people we believed in, leaders and good people.
And then we went after venture funding to start the company because we also knew we needed to accelerate the development. We couldn’t compete if we just started doing little jobs. That would be too linear for the growth of a technological thing like VR. So we went after it and were able to secure venture funding as a seed investment at the time from a Brazilian fund.
We also bootstrapped a bit, putting our own sweat and money into everything, and that’s how we started. Then we grew organically in stages: as we got amazing new projects, as we got successful with our games, and we were able to grow, grow, grow. Now we’re 130 people. That’s crazy, right?
We also grew very carefully. We never laid anybody off, for instance, and I don’t plan to. We were very careful with how we managed capital and how we invest. I feel like I’m responsible for 130 people in my company, so we always try to be very careful: solid projects and conscious growth.
We see a lot of studios that get investments, then grow like crazy and then have to fire half their people. We were always very careful about that and I think it works, even on a business as risky and complex as VR.
Then the other side of the equation is the talent. I can’t even believe how talented our team is. It’s just amazing people; we built our culture around it and this culture is very strong. I think those are the secrets: strong culture, amazing people, good leadership and good values as well. We treat people well, we don’t crunch, we respect people’s work-life balance, and some CEOs don’t believe in that.
I think, especially for a creative industry like games, it’s so hard. If you’re a programmer, if you work building something like a taxi app, you’re probably gonna make more money unless you’re really good and lucky. It’s such a difficult industry, you have to be passionate about it, so we’re very careful with how we treat people. Maybe other companies make more money in the short term, but it pays off in the end. I’m in it for the long term, not for short-term gains, and I believe this philosophy helps with being able to overcome these challenges.
Tell us about some of the games your studio has worked on.
Our first game was called Pixel Ripped. It was written by a brilliant, creative genius called Ana Ribeiro. She’s a pioneer in VR in Brazil, [coming] from Maranhão and became a self-taught game developer, then went to London to study game development and started doing VR.
She was already building Pixel Ripped when I met her and then, when I started ARVORE, we connected again. She came into the company and brought Pixel Ripped [with her]. She was working on it by herself and she couldn’t finish it by herself, so we built a team and that was our first game: Pixel Ripped 1989.
It was a success for the state of VR, it was still very small in 2018. And then we built a sequel, Pixel Ripped 1995, which was super successful. That one came out in 2020, it is still selling well and got super high reviews, awards, etc. And then we did Pixel Ripped 1978, which was published by Atari. We built it with them, and it was based on the Atari era. It’s a love letter to gaming, people love it and it’s called a VR classic already.
In the meantime, we did The Line, which was a project we started as a VR narrative. We were learning so much, we had internal experiments of amazing embodied narratives and things like that, and we said, “We have to do this.” I wanted us to be recognized internationally, and I said let’s do something to earn awards.
So we created The Line and our initial goal was to be selected at the Venice Film Festival, which is a prestigious film award and they have an Extended Reality competition. We got selected and then we won the Venice Film Festival. It was the first time Brazilian cinema had ever won it in 72 editions of the festival and it was with a VR interactive animation.
We showed Meta the game and they were launching the hand-tracking for the Quest, and Meta funded us bringing it to the Quest and being a launch title for hand-tracking. Then, that version won the award for Primetime Emmy Awards, which was not even in my list of possibilities, and that helped a lot and opened a lot of doors.
Then we did YUKI. We wanted to translate the bullet hell genre to VR. It’s very unique, you hold an action figure in your hand and move your character around. YUKI was nominated for best VR game at DICE, which was a super big honor. I went to the DICE Awards and it was amazing. We didn’t win, but it was still amazing.
We started working with Meta on Horizon Worlds, making a bunch of worlds including the one for The Office. Then we launched Clawball, which was a social multiplayer game where you play soccer as cats in VR. It got hundreds of thousands of downloads, a lot of engagement and it’s super fun. Then, around that time, we started The Boys project with Sony Pictures and launched it on Quest in March. We’re working on the PlayStation version now, and it’s awesome.
Now we have a bunch of projects in the pipeline. I can’t talk about any of them, unfortunately, because we have NDAs, but we have a very busy pipeline, and we are working on some pretty amazing stuff.
Any final words you’d like to say to our audience?
Try The Boys, it’s great, the game is super fun. Especially if you’re a fan of the show, it’s a legit story and it was literally written by the same writers along with our narrative designers at ARVORE. And continue on the lookout for what we are doing because we’re doing some pretty cool stuff.