Etermax hit it big during the mobile gaming revolution when it published Trivia Crack back in 2013. Word of mouth helped the game spread on Android and iOS to more than 800 million downloads.
And now Buenos Aires, Argentina-based Etermax has turned its attention to virtual reality. And it has scored a hit with the quirky and comedic VR title Airport Security Guard. The game isn’t huge like Trivia Crack yet, but it’s been gaining traction.
In its first month after its launch in August, the game had more than 150,000 downloads and a rating of 4.9 stars out of 5 on the Meta Quest Store with thousands of reviews. The title is not a dry simulation. It’s focused on comedy.
Instead of training you to be an employee of the Transportation Security Administration, your job is to catch smugglers hiding ridiculous items like a cheesecake in your luggage. You have spot forged passports and very strange documents. You have to scan bags and react to suspicious density spikes or hidden objects. And the passenger lists are kind of wack, with elves, monsters or holiday characters trying to get through the screening.
This is the kind of casual gaming experience that does well on VR, which has an active global user base of 171 million, according to market researcher Demand Sage. It’s not the billion or so headsets that early advocates predicted back in 2016. But it’s a growing and healthy market where the competition isn’t as crazed as it is in mobile or PC/consoles.
Etermax, which is Argentina’s most successful game company, has bet on this space because it’s a defensible market with a core following of enthusiastic gamers, said Federico Segovia, head of XR Studio at Etermax, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Segovia, who has been at Etermax since 2016 as a game designer and now head of product, worked on the Trivia Crack World project for a year.
While many people think that VR hardware is only attractive to hardcore gamers, there are a lot of casual games at the top of the VR stores. The content includes casual, midcore and hardcore games. While the market is still early, VR games are becoming successful enough to support a number of mid-size game studios like Schell Games and Resolution Games.
Launch strategy
The company launched multiple VR games this year on the Meta platform as it tried to build a pipeline of casual viral XR content, developed in Latin America and played around the world. Budgets for these games aren’t as high as the triple-A gaming space, and the team sizes are not huge either. It’s a potential growth business in gaming, and Etermax is trying to create games that anyone — including your cousin, grandma or roommate — can play because the experience of the hardware is more intuitive, Segovia said.
“We started last year and launched our first game in VR, Trivia Crack World,” said Segovia. “But this year we changed the strategy because our first idea was to bring our main game to VR. Something that we started to look at this year was to target this audience that perhaps is looking not for trivia games but other kinds of genres.”
The team launched with a plan to debut 10 titles in different genres quickly to see where the demand would materialize. All of the games focused on original content, which was similar to the company’s approach at the onset of mobile games. Etermax came to specialize in trivia, board games and others.
The team came up with quirky titles like Room Invaders, a mixed-reality shooter game. Then came Airport Security Guard, which content creators fell in love with on video platforms. That helped the game get a lot of reach and it has tens of thousands of reviews. To keep players coming back, Etermax has created multiple add-on content for the game.
“It’s a funny game, and we wanted to show what could happen in airport situations, but with a humorous flavor,” Segovia said.
How viral can it be?
For those familiar with Papers Please, the notion of getting through a security screening may make people think they know this kind of title. But Airport Security Guard is much more immersive.
“It’s easy to learn, but you can do a lot of things with the things that you find in the luggage,” said Segovia. “You can interact with the passenger, and it feels like a sandbox game. You can take your time to interact with the things and see how passengers or others react.”
Since Airport Security Guard is going well, the company paused the idea of launching ten titles and it is reinvesting in Airport Security Guard’s team. Roughly 80% of the VR team is focused on Airport Security Guard, and about 20% is on Animal Guys. The team is listening to player feedback and it is adjusting the gameplay as needed.
Many of the customers for the game in are in the U.S., but the audience is global. Over time, the company added a multiplayer mode for the title. I suggested that they tackle a game called Airport Baggage Handler, since I went to Gamescom back in August and Lufthansa lost my luggage for five days in Cologne, Germany. (It was a comedy of errors).
Segovia replied, “In airports, we have a lot of situations that we can take advantage of and bring it into the game. You also have duty-free sales or an interrogation room.
“There are a lot of situations you can bring into the game,” he said. “This game could be expanded in a lot of ways.”
Other games
Apart from Airport Security Guard, Etermax launched Trivia Crack World in 2024 on Meta Quest. The game was the first-ever immersive trivia game on Meta Quest, offering a dynamic and engaging experience for casual gamers, trivia enthusiasts, and families alike.
Etermax also rolled out Room Invaders this year: a fast-paced mixed-reality shooter where your home turns into a battlefield to protect a cute alien from invading ships. It also launched Animal Guys, a multiplayer VR race with flailing creatures and crazy weapons.
More titles are on the way, but the team is split between those who are working to enhance and grow Airport Security Guard and those working on new titles. Etermax first started designing and launching its social-first XR games back in 2022.
“We’ve always believed in designing for the technologies that could one day disrupt our own business,” said Maximo Cavazzani, CEO of Etermax, back in August. “We’re convinced that extended realities will become the new default, and as we’ve done before, we want to be ready when that shift happens. That means creating experiences that make more sense when you wear a headset than when you tap a screen.”
Overall, Etermax has around 200 people and the XR studio has about 20.
“We find that faster iterations help us understand what users want, and if there is something that really works,” Segovia said. “We are learning a lot. With every launch, we are learning how to do it better. We can iterate for the next launch and do better.”
With this title, Segovia said that the rate of conversions for Airport Security Guard was far better than Room Invaders, and that meant the game was working a lot better and was going more viral.