VAIL VR (Part Two): A Look Inside AEXLAB’S Community-Driven Live Ops Engine

In November of 2024, the development team at AEXLAB⁠ made the calculated decision to shift VAIL VR⁠, their flagship first person shooter, from a premium $29.99 price tag to a hybrid free-to-play model. It was a bold move that capped off months of internal debate and soul-searching. After all, VAIL VR was a labor of love seven years in the making, one that reached over 21,000 monthly active users (MAU) in its first 30 days after launching on the Meta Horizon Store.

The premium model worked… at least at first. VAIL VR was well-received by critics and players alike, but that initial traction revealed a narrow albeit healthy audience that was quickly approaching its ceiling. The widening gap between people who tried the game and players who actually stuck around became impossible to ignore. Removing the upfront purchase price would eventually make the game more accessible to a broader audience, but it would also introduce the next big challenge: How was AEXLAB planning on retaining those players and actually turning them into paying customers?

Answering this question kicked off an intense four month stretch of experimentation and improvisation culminating with the rollout of the game’s subscription service, VAIL Alliance⁠. In the sections below, we’ll explore how they did it: how they turned player feedback into the community-driven live operations engine that defines the game today.

Let’s get into it.

AEXLAB co-founders Albert and Jonathan Ovadia learned firsthand just how quickly players formed opinions, and how quickly those opinions could lead players to drop off. As we saw in Part One, a confusing first session or a frustrating match was often more than enough to lose a player for good.

The developers responded with speed: outside of major tentpole updates, they shipped fixes as quickly as possible, often every few days, to address sticking points and keep content fresh. Early on after the pivot to a hybrid free-to-play model, the team focused on refining the onboarding process and tracked three critical checkpoints to measure whether new players were actually sticking around, namely:

✔️ Did players complete the two-minute intro tutorial? VAIL VR requires unique physical actions like swinging your arms to jump and manually inserting a magazine to reload. The developers built a short guide to teach these mechanics, and tracking completion rates helped them identify where players got stuck or confused so they could smooth out the experience.

✔️ Did players jump into matches in Training Grounds? Training Grounds is a structured combat mode built on four small maps, each designed to give players a controlled taste of the action. By tracking this checkpoint, the team could discern whether players understood the game was a tactical shooter requiring skill and strategy, rather than a social hangout space.

✔️ Did they return to the Citadel after their first session? The Citadel is VAIL's social hub where players can relax, play mini-games like hockey, or hang out with friends. By tracking day-one retention (how many people came back after their very first session), the team could see if the game's vibe was inviting enough to make players want to return and whether the social environment was building the foundation for a lasting community.

By contrast, for more granular gameplay tuning updates like weapon balance and rule adjustments, the team relied on community sentiment in Discord and live matches. If players were vocal about something breaking the flow, the team treated it as a serious signal worth addressing.

But to actually address those signals, they needed to build out a process for shipping fixes.

Even before VAIL’s launch, the team spent hours watching players push each build until something snapped. When it did, they were often already in Discord responding to it in real time. “There’s nothing more humbling than seeing something you spend hours and hours developing just fall apart as somebody tries it out,” says Jonathan.

Jonathan made it a point to stay as close to that experience as possible by personally jumping into live matches⁠ and playing alongside the community. He watched where new players were getting stuck or confused and then carried those observations straight into the next update.

As the player base expanded, the team continued to pop into the game, watch a live match to identify the sticking point, and move on to testing a fix. It all laddered back to a simple philosophy: “Watch how players behave, not just what they say.”

✔️ Ship a small experiment first. The team shipped highly targeted updates like rule tweaks and weapons tuning that addressed specific friction points.

✔️ Watch what actually changes. The change stayed if it addressed the problem. If it introduced new ones, the team removed it.

✔️ Keep a tight feedback loop. Each patch gave players a concrete response in real time, which invited a steady stream of feedback.

Complaints were useful. So were jokes about in-game bugs and offhand comments buried in random threads. The team treated all of it as a signal, so long as it tied back to what players were actually doing and where the experience broke down.

“All of it was gut feeling from just playing,” Jonathan says. “Community sentiment, whether it was in-game reviews, Discord, Reddit, just searching keywords, were very helpful.”

Even ideas that started as memes were fair game, so long as they matched actual player behavior. Mining, a mainstay in the game today, started as a Minecraft-inspired⁠ meme in Discord. But once the team saw how often players returned to the idea, they treated it as a real signal and built it out. The feature was later refined by adding utility items like the Mining Helmet to reward time where players were already logging long sessions.

The same pattern showed up with VAIL’s recently launched Extraction⁠ mode. What began as a community joke, something akin to “How cool would it be if VAIL had an extraction mode?”, turned into a dedicated experience complete with its own maps and rules. Squads drop in, chase loot and objectives, and then fight their way to an extraction point.

Now that AEXLAB had built a working process for turning player signals into features, they needed a public surface to shout those features from the rooftops. AEXLAB CEO Jonathan Ovadia took the lead by handling VAIL’s marketing himself, initially leaning into scripted videos with high production values. He posted these across Discord to rally the existing community, TikTok to chase algorithmic discovery with new players, and platforms like Reddit and Twitter to maintain visibility with the broader VR audience. As polished as it was, this content took more time to produce and cost more than the team could afford.

So, Jonathan changed tactics. Instead of spending days creating the perfect asset, he began posting everything from short clips and raw gameplay captured from his phone. If an update was scheduled to ship, he made sure some piece of social marketing went out the same day.

That “shotgun everything” phase worked in the short term. It kept VAIL visible without slowing development, but it also exposed the fact that no one single person could carry that pace forever. If frequent updates were going to remain visible, the team needed a way to pass the baton.

Enter the AEXLAB Creator Program⁠.

Instead of hiring a marketing team, the team created the AEXLAB Creator Program to bring the creators already making VAIL content into the conversation. The program lives inside AEXLAB’s Discord⁠ and is open to anyone who is interested and willing to produce VAIL content. There is no follower threshold or platform requirement, or even a formal application process for that matter. Anyone can join, and as of writing, the program boasts over 300 creators hailing from small channels to more well-established influencers.

✔️ Publish often and favor raw gameplay. Creators are expected to produce content regularly with an emphasis on fast reactions over polished production.

✔️ Receive in-game rewards tied to participation. AEXLAB offers in-game currency and items directly tied to creator activity. Members also receive early access to new builds and recurring currency drops through the VAIL Alliance subscription.

✔️ Time content around major updates. Creator campaigns are coordinated with major releases, especially when new modes launch.

✔️ Feed the content bank. Creator clips give the team a deep bench of footage to repost, remix, and redeploy across channels.

Chandler Efros is living proof of how a content creator could quite literally join the AEXLAB team. As a YouTuber⁠ dedicated to creating VAIL content⁠, Chandler caught Albert and Jonathan’s attention, so much so that they recruited him to help with the game’s marketing. It was just a matter of time before he transitioned into the company's lead producer and designer, where he drove the reset of the new player funnel.

By formalizing what began as a scrappy workaround, AEXLAB turned creator output into a durable part of its live ops operation: updates ship, creators surface them, and the game stays visible between major releases.

If creator campaigns kept VAIL present between major releases, it's the game's culture itself that helped retain newcomers.

VAIL asks a lot of its players early on. Loadouts matter. Positioning matters. Map knowledge matters. Team coordination matters. That depth is a double-edged sword; it keeps veterans active and engaged, but it can overwhelm a new player in a matter of minutes.

What softened that learning curve was the way veterans behaved in public spaces. Albert Ovadia saw it firsthand whenever he hopped into the game to test new features. When someone new opened the menu and clearly had no idea what they were looking at, another player would walk over, even if they were on the other team, and say: “Oh hey, are you new? I can show you how to do that.” He describes it as a “beautiful thing” that happens regularly in-game.

When the team observed this firsthand, they deliberately built systems to grease the wheels even further. For example, when they dropped the shareable Mining Helmet as part of the VAIL Alliance subscription, it removed PvP in the mining zone, which gave veterans an easy way to protect newcomers while they learned the ins-and-outs of the game.

As of writing, VAIL holds a 4.8 out of 5 from over 59,000 ratings⁠ on the Meta Horizon Store alone.

The live ops engine AEXLAB built to reach these numbers works because every piece connects back to player behavior. Discord chatter turns into fixes. Fixes turn into UGC clips. Clips pull players in, then give new players a safe path through early pain points. The loop stays tight, and the team stays small, which means they can ship fast without compromising what makes VAIL VR work.

AEXLAB didn’t try to outproduce the competition. They shortened the distance between “players struggled here” and “we changed it.” And when you do that, the sky’s the limit.

AEXLAB built VAIL by shipping fast, testing relentlessly, and treating their community as partners in development. If that approach sounds right for your studio, the Meta Horizon Start Program gives you the resources to get there.

✔️ Technical guidance from Meta staff and developers who've shipped VR titles

✔️ Software credits and early product releases that compress your build cycle

✔️ A global network of creators solving similar problems, plus exclusive developer events

Apply to Start today and start building your feedback loop.

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