Steve Zhao, Sandbox VR’s founder and chief executive, credited “Jason, Carolyne, and their team” with making the opening possible. Carolyne Chan, co-owner of JLG Ventures, said the group plans “more locations across New York City.” JLG lists the venue in its portfolio alongside New York hospitality brands including Raku and Double Chicken Please. The space runs to 10,324 square feet. It holds six private rooms where groups of up to six suit up in headsets and haptic vests and can see one another inside the game, plus two party rooms and a bar. Commercial Observer reported the lease on June 1: ten years, roughly 10,600 square feet, of which 600 are on the ground floor and 10,000 on the level below, at an asking rent of $750,000 a year according to people familiar with the deal. Neither side has disclosed the agreed terms.
October 23, or October 30
The opening date depends on which Sandbox VR page a reader goes by. The release says October 23, with 20 percent off for anyone who books by October 22. The venue’s own page on sandboxvr.com, checked by VR.org on October 17, says “Opens October 30!” It runs the same discount through October 30, and the store directory built into the page’s code gives October 30 as the opening date too. A Wayback Machine capture of the page from September 16 shows a third date: “Opening October 9th, 2026.” Sandbox VR has not said publicly which date now stands. If October 30 holds, a venue whose top billing goes to a zombie game opens in Manhattan the day before Halloween.
That directory is also one public way to check the 100 figure. On October 17 it listed 99 venues in 14 countries and territories, 63 of them in the United States and 13 in Germany. Ninety-two had opening dates already behind them. The other seven, Times Square among them, are dated from October 23, for The Falls in Miami, to January 1, 2027, for Roseville Galleria. The release does not say how Sandbox VR counts to 100. The directory may not be exhaustive either, but on its face the round number takes in venues that have yet to open.
Set beside the September capture, the directory shows how often those dates move. Four venues had their opening dates changed in that month. All four moved later: Jacksonville by a week, Cologne by two, and Times Square and Downtown Houston by three each. The network is also young. Twenty of the 92 open venues opened in 2026, more than in any full year the directory covers, against 19 in 2025 and 17 in 2022. Because the directory lists only venues that exist today, anything that opened earlier and has since closed is missing, which tilts the comparison toward recent years.
The series Sandbox VR made itself
In August, Evan Marcus wrote on this site that Sandbox VR “now runs on licensed IP the way a cinema does,” citing its three Netflix titles. The company’s own numbers support a narrower reading. The one licensed title it has put a figure on is Squid Game Virtuals, which a March 26 announcement, as reported by GamesBeat, said had passed $50 million in lifetime sales since its 2023 release. That announcement also named Deadwood the company’s most popular experience, and the October release calls it “the Sandbox VR original Deadwood series.” The two figures are not like for like. Squid Game’s covers one game and was counted in March. Deadwood’s spans three games, was counted in September, and comes with no release dates in either announcement. Even so, the series Sandbox VR created has produced 2.8 times the sales of its best-documented Netflix title. Four of the 12 experiences listed for Times Square are Deadwood games.
Divided out, $140 million across 2.66 million tickets comes to about $53 a ticket, if the sales figure is ticket revenue alone. The release does not say. Times Square tickets start at $57, according to the venue page. The volume figures hang together. March’s announcement put lifetime players above five million and October’s puts tickets sold above six million, roughly a million more in six and a half months. That is close to the 150,000 a month the company gives for its current traffic, provided the two releases count the same thing under different words.
For a property owner or hospitality group weighing a Sandbox VR franchise, the October release reads as evidence that the business leans hardest on a series the company created itself. On the figures disclosed so far, the licensed Netflix titles are the smaller share of sales. For a group planning a visit around the Times Square opening, the practical point is narrower. Four venues pushed their dates back within a single month, so the date to plan around is the one on the booking confirmation.
