G-Smash Hopes to Bring VR Developers Together & Grow the Japanese Market For All

At a time when VR is showing signs of vulnerability and instability globally, the Japanese industry has fared somewhat better than most. It may still be smaller, but caution in producing the high-risk, high-reward titles that could plunge a studio into underperformance has helped them weather the storm better than most. There are also other societal factors that can help these teams, at the least, weather the storm.

Japan hosts an entertainment and attractions industry happy to fund VR experiences in theme parks and for corporate uses, giving companies alternative revenue streams, while successful titles from its higher-profile developers with games like Ruinsmagus and Exit 8 VR keep a spotlight on the talent in the country and keep the industry stable. Also a factor is a sense of camaraderie between VR studios, a group brought together not just by nationality but a shared passion and, more recently, a new G-Smash initiative focused on advocating on their behalf and showcasing a united front and varied face to the industry that, they hope, can attract new players to the medium and technology.

Bitsummit, Japan’s biggest indie gaming event, invited 68,000 people to the country’s ancient capital of Kyoto over multiple days to celebrate indie developers and smaller creators. Yet the biggest booth belonged not to console manufacturers like Nintendo or PlayStation, or any of the major publishers of indie games from both inside and outside of Japan. Instead, that belonged to G-Smash, spread across not just a sponsored VR-focused game jam but a shared space for 15 developers from inside and outside Japan to present their games in one united front, showcasing the scale and breadth of what is possible inside the medium.

The initiative is a relatively recent one, started by founder Shun Harashima only shortly before last year’s Bitsummit event before spending the months that followed gaining support from manufacturers like Meta and Pico. G-Smash was founded with the intent to bring developers together, connect them to companies who can provide the funding to bring their games to life, and most importantly, introduce VR to the millions still skeptical or yet to try the medium for themselves. Much of which is inspired by his own childhood, where, after moving from Japan to the US at five years old, Pokemon fever took him from an outcast to a popular kid and helped him make friends in a new country.

That appreciation led him into the Japanese entertainment industry after a stint at toy manufacturer Takara Tomy, and later led to a broader fascination with the medium. “VR has always been my thing,” he explains. “Japan always felt ahead of other countries at the time, with open VR exhibition spaces like the [now-closed] Shinjuku VR Zone, or Bandai Namco’s location-based entertainment experiences. I started working on VR as an actual job when I joined Konami in 2018, helping to launch their first VR game, which led me to being a contact point to Meta and later joining them. There, I got to meeting so many other developers. Unfortunately, sometimes companies pivot, and Japan is not always the first priority, whereas my passion was always here. I wanted to do more for it.”

It’s no secret that the VR industry, like all of gaming, has undergone a turbulent few years, seen more acutely within VR in part due to the tighter budgets and finer margins many developers in the industry have always faced. While Sony have not entirely abandoned VR – they were a sponsor of G-Smash’s XR Yokocho booth alongside Meta and Pico, a first for all three companies to come together to sponsor a collective VR showcase – the underperformance of PlayStation VR2 has made it more difficult to reach new players, while low sales for some titles have led to the closure of studios and numerous canceled projects across all platforms.

Regular news about closures, such as that of Metro Awakening studio Vertigo Studios Amsterdam, highlights how even larger teams are far from immune from these challenges. For all that the industry has its share of successes, it’s a space where many are understandably nervous knowing one failed release, or a sudden change in direction from the likes of Meta, could be enough to plunge a company into crisis.

But it’s precisely this that makes a united front from G-Smash important, according to Shun. “The first XR Yokocho event at Bitsummit 2025 was my first act with G-Smash, but I had to put it together in only two months after leaving Meta, and used all my severance package from the company to make it happen. I wanted to grow the VR market in Japan which is why, when I had this huge space, I went international to the US, not just to domestic creators. It has to be something international, it has to be known by everyone in the industry.

“That’s why it’s very important for Western developers to come over and find opportunities. This is about helping grow the market in Japan, which would ultimately help all developers, everywhere.”

The Japanese industry does have its own unique quirks that have proved to be long-term hurdles in adoption that make these initiatives important. For all consumer-grade VR has its place, it’s harder to sell to the general public as a result of smaller apartments and homes alongside other cultural norms. By contrast, though, in-person event-driven VR experiences succeed both within Tokyo and beyond. Tyffonium and Excurio show that you can maintain these large-scale immersive experiences, with the former even being a domestic company now hard at work on their own Final Fantasy effort with Square Enix to premiere later this year. Even the major developers are willing to give it a chance in these spheres – Capcom’s AR-driven Monster Hunter Bridge was initially developed for the World Expo 2025 in Osaka and made in-house, but its success means it will now receive a permanent exhibition inside the Nijigen no Mori theme park on Awaji Island.

G-Smash’s XR Yokocho booth was about more than merely making itself known with a splashy, large space. A secondary goal is to support creatives in reducing the risk of high-risk projects while promoting innovation that’s low-risk if it fails, but has a chance for viral success within and beyond VR. On one end of the spectrum, you had CharacterBank showing off their latest demo for the upcoming Knights of Fiona, with a layer of polish as they build towards beta tests for the game’s online components. A preview video for the upcoming Evangelion VR game was also shown, as were a number of currently-available big-hitters like Lumines Arise.

Yet for smaller projects, UNIVRS and Character Bank both had titles made in partnership with G-Smash that were defined as small-scale, quick-to-develop experiences with replayability to keep people coming back. For UNIVRS, they developed the fitness-like rhythm punching game Project Punch, while Sausage Batting was the name for the rather hilarious sausage fest the latter team produced.

“Both of those games are ideas we came up with at G-Smash in partnership with those developers, and we want to launch both of them this year. We built these teams two months ago, brainstormed, and just ran with it. We want to create conversations, launch these games, and create conversations that will bring people to take a fresh look at VR. After all, VR is very indie, so we should use that flexibility to create whatever we can to see if we can connect with people.

“I don’t want to do this alone, but I want to make the industry more exciting. If VR is small, we should use it to our advantage. We want variety, but for example, we could launch five sausage games from different companies in the space of a few months, and suddenly everyone can do it. VR is about sausages now! No one can do that on any other platform and shift the entire medium like is possible in VR because of its hyper-indie focus. But if you’re going to do that, you have to make it first. It’s not about who wins or loses. In Sausage Batting, you’re playing with this sausage, and because it’s wiggling it’s really hard to hit, but if you hit it just right it gets hard and you have a home run. Yet, if you wanted, you could create sausage darts, or fish with sausages, or grow sausages in a garden.

“I want a level of quality, but I want conversations to start around VR. If people notice such a movement, they may be confused about all the sausages, but then maybe they look further. The same goes for creating showcases at Bitsummit like XR Yokocho. They may see it one year and wonder what it is, but then when it comes back the next year, they check it out because it’s not a one-time thing. Then, bigger companies in the space like Flat2VR come here, and suddenly XR Yokocho is a recurring thing. That’s how trends are made. I want to make things happen, and try everything without regret. That’s the spirit of G-Smash.”

This philosophy spread to the student-driven game jam with four unique VR experiences made by aspiring devs. Winning the cash prize was Torima Headbang, a game as silly as it was immediately captivating to the audiences who would crowd and stare as people played. It certainly caused the scene G-Smash hoped to create, as you controlled a bird on a skateboard building speed by headbanging while wearing the headset to get the highest score. Perhaps slightly neck pain-inducing if you weren’t careful, but it’s not designed for something too intensive or for a long session. If anything, it’s exactly what VR needed: something just silly enough yet immediately simple to understand that anyone can play, while also being enhanced in manners only possible within VR.

“We found 90% of the people visiting our booths at Bitsummit have never played VR before,” explains Shun. “Maybe they tried it once in 2015 or 2016, but things have changed so much. It’s easy to be in the industry and think everyone knows about it, but the reality is, even in the US, people know about VR, but not many have actually played it. When they’ve played it, then they think about purchasing it, but my role is to do that since companies need to make money to survive to keep playing games. That also means bringing developers together, not just audiences, through mixers and events, or community building, talking to investors and informing them about the current market.

“A lot of people don’t even know about Gorilla Tag! Investors in VR, they know about the game, but other people don’t actually know about the numbers and the excitement around it and just how popular it is. And for Japanese developers it’s harder when investors are often in English and there’s that language barrier, or maybe they have a good game but are terrible at pitching it to people.”

Was the booth a success? Overall I would have to say yes. Growing in size from last year, with more attendees, if the goal is to introduce the potential of VR to those who, after more than 10 years, either have not tried or do not realize how much VR has advanced in the intervening years, saw a representative sample of the industry in one space. They even saw beyond games – Wrath: Aeon of Ruin VR was showcased with haptic hardware chairs and accessories to further immerse in ways that traditional flatscreen games are unable to achieve.

Bitsummit, beyond being a showcase of games, holds regular stage events where developers can share their games and talk about development. One of the more talked-about of these stages involved Shuto Mikami, the CEO of CharacterBank, speaking with former President of SIE Worldwide Studios and Head of PlayStation Indies Shuhei Yoshida about Knights of Fiona and the VR industry, with the names alone being enough to bring curious onlookers to the show to hear what they had to say.

Over time, maybe the conversation will spread beyond a single event or the whispers of enthusiasts and return to the mainstream once more. G-Smash will likely be key in that change.