The best HTC Vive virtual reality games make you hot and sweaty

I’ve sampled some HTC Vive virtual reality games with a final production unit over the past week, and I’ve tried out more titles at preview events. The ones that really grab me are visceral shooting experiences that leave you hot and sweaty.

As we’ve pointed out a lot, we’re just at the beginning of VR. There’s no killer app just yet. But there are a lot of experiences that turn VR into a real social experience as you’ll have a lot of fun playing these games with friends. And that could make a difference as to whether or not VR will become a $30 billion market by 2020, as predicted by Digi-Capital.This whole category was termed “active VR” by James Iliff, the cofounder and chief creative officer at VR game startup Survios. They’re not exercise games per se, but they will make you perform a lot of physical activity. So long, couch potato.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.