At the world’s largest extended reality hackathon, gaming is on the rise.
Between January 22 and today, January 26, over 700 developers, mentors, vendors and other observers traveled to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston for Reality Hack, the XR industry’s largest annual hackathon event. For Reality Hack’s ninth iteration this year, the event included its first-ever official gaming track, inviting hackers to spend three days developing creative gaming experiences for virtual reality headsets, smart glasses and all manner of other XR devices.
Gaming has long been one of the most accessible entry points for users interested in XR technology, but the organizers of Reality Hack did not include gaming as a dedicated track at the event in past years. Reality Hack’s decision to host its first dedicated gaming track in 2026 was a reflection of growing demand from past attendees, as well as an increased awareness of the cultural power of games across all of the event’s stakeholders, according to Reality Hack executive director Maria Rice.
This was Reality Hack’s first foray into gaming, and most of the game developers who showed up to speak or participate in the event were representatives of dedicated VR or XR game studios, rather than triple-A game developers or major publishers. But another type of Blizzard was in attendance at the event for its penultimate day on Sunday, January 25: As Winter Storm Fern approached Boston in the early afternoon, MIT authorities officially pulled the plug on the event, closing all campus buildings hours earlier than planned and forcing the rest of the judging process to go virtual.
XR gaming has not grown as fast as anticipated by some observers in recent years, with global VR headset sales reaching a seven-year low last year, according to data shared by IDC — but you wouldn’t know it from stepping into the room at Reality Hack. This year’s gaming track, which was sponsored by PreviewLabs and Petricore Games and offers the winner a $1,500 prize, featured 18 participating teams, with projects like a collaborative ball-in-a-maze game simulator and a drawing game that used large-language models to interpret players’ creations. (A disclosure: Reality Hack covered GamesBeat’s travel costs to attend the event, and I served as a judge for the hackathon’s gaming track.)
XR game developers’ passion and belief in their medium of choice was on full display at Experiential 2026, the conference portion of the event, which took place on January 23 and 24. The conference featured two dedicated gaming talks, including a session on creativity featuring PreviewLabs founder Bernard François and Operative Games founder Jon Snoddy, as well as a panel about the real-world impact of XR games.
During the real-world impact panel, speakers including Google AndroidXR developer relations technical lead Vinny DaSilva and Owlchemy Labs gameplay engineer Jonathan Jennings acknowledged the recent wave of layoffs that has hit both the XR gaming space and the broader gaming industry, but expressed their ongoing confidence about the future of extended reality devices as gaming platforms.
“Over-investments always do get right-sized over time,” said panelist Erin Becks, a strategic advisor in XR for the company Airlite, during the session. “It’s unfortunate to see so many games and projects get shuttered by the whims of big tech — but it’s a show of maturity.”