Fast Travel Games released the <a href="https://247videogame.com/payday-aces-high-official-gameplay-trailer-vr-games-showcase-august-2026/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>first gameplay footage from PAYDAY: Aces High on August 13, showing the “Stealing Candy From A Billionaire” mission in action — and the Stockholm studio simultaneously announced that a closed community playtest will begin August 20 and run through August 24 on Meta Quest 3, with limited slots available. The PAYDAY franchise’s first VR entry puts players inside the heist in a way the flat-screen games never could: physically aiming weapons, physically crouching in cover, and physically hauling cash bags to the getaway point.
The distinction between “built for VR” and “ported to VR” matters more in action co-op games than in almost any other genre. In a standard flat-screen PAYDAY heist, pulling a trigger is a mouse click and carrying a bag is pressing a key while walking. In a six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) VR environment, the same actions require the player to point a tracked controller the way they are actually pointing their arm, to physically bend down to pick up an object, and to stay physically aware of where every crewmate is in real space. The muscle-memory and spatial reasoning engaged are categorically different — and so is the weight of consequence when an alarm trips.
Fast Travel Games has built Aces High from scratch to exploit that difference. That means the locomotion, the weapon feel, and the environmental design were all authored for a head-mounted display context — not adapted from a keyboard-and-mouse template and hoped to work. For a franchise built on organized chaos in tight environments, the choice to develop natively for VR rather than port an existing entry is significant.
What the Gameplay Trailer Confirms
The “Stealing Candy From A Billionaire” mission shows the crew infiltrating one of antagonist Warren Jupiter’s operations using a mix of stealth reconnaissance and escalating gunfire. The arsenal visible in the footage includes assault rifles, SMGs, shotguns, and pistols; gadgets include grapple hooks for vertical traversal and sentry guns that can be deployed as automated cover. Completing heists earns cash and reputation, which feed a progression system for unlocking additional skills, equipment, and gear configurations.
The game supports up to four players in online co-op, with cross-platform multiplayer between Meta Quest and SteamVR headsets — allowing standalone headset users and PC VR users to play in the same session without friction. Solo play is also supported.
Meet Your Crew: Four Aces, Four Playstyles
The playable roster is built around a card suit motif, with each character specializing in a different approach to a heist:
The Ace of Hearts — The Mastermind leads from the front — quiet when it can be quiet, but without hesitation when it cannot. His skills center on team morale, keeping crewmates patched up in a firefight, assault rifles, and mobility.
The Ace of Diamonds — The Technician is the veteran who has been doing this longer than anyone else on the crew. Gadgets are her domain — sentry gun deployments, tech-forward solutions, SMGs — and she orchestrates the mechanical side of any job.
The Ace of Spades — The Enforcer is the hammer. Monumentally angry, fiercely loyal, and built for the moment everything goes loud. Shotguns, grenades, and maximum disruption.
The Ace of Clubs — The Ghost doesn’t talk unless she has something worth saying. Silent, surgical, operating on hacking tools and pistols. She is gone before anyone realizes the job has already been pulled.
The Story: Revenge Against a Business Titan
Four elite thieves — The Aces — are framed by Warren Jupiter, a business tycoon with enough reach to have them thrown in jail. When they get out, the score is personal. Jupiter’s banks, his museums, and his supposedly impenetrable luxury penthouse become the targets. The central dramatic question is whether a crew running on black-market tech, improvised gadgets, and barely-controlled chaos can take down a man who owns the systems designed to stop exactly this. The tone sits at the intersection of slick crime-movie competence and gleeful disorder — the kind of heist that starts as Heat and ends as something you’d rather not explain to the insurance company.
Fast Travel Games: A Decade of VR, With a Lot Riding on This One
Fast Travel Games was founded in 2016 in Stockholm by veterans from DICE (the Battlefield series), Rovio (Angry Birds), and Mirror’s Edge. In the decade since, the studio built its reputation on VR-exclusive games: Apex Construct (2018), Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife (2021), Vampire: The Masquerade – Justice, and Cities: VR, among others. That experience base makes the studio one of the more credible choices to handle a VR-native PAYDAY entry.
What the marketing materials do not mention is that in January 2025, Fast Travel Games laid off approximately 30 employees — roughly 60 percent of its workforce — after six 2024 releases underperformed commercially. The studio cited “lower sales than expected” and what CEO Oskar Burman described as “a more uncertain year ahead for VR games overall.” The studio consolidated to a single development team. PAYDAY: Aces High is the project that team is now building, under license from Starbreeze. For a studio that had to cut most of its staff because VR game sales disappointed, a contract to develop one of gaming’s most recognized co-op franchises in VR represents both the opportunity and the test that follows a period of serious financial pressure.
“Bringing the iconic PAYDAY universe to VR has been more than a milestone for our studio — it’s been a genuine privilege,” said Oskar Burman, CEO of Fast Travel Games.
How VR Changes What a Heist Actually Feels Like
The engineering constraint that defines the VR heist experience is latency. A VR system must update the player’s view within roughly 50 milliseconds of a head movement — preferably under 15 milliseconds to avoid nausea — or the mismatch between what the inner ear senses and what the eyes see triggers nausea and disorientation. Meta Quest 3 achieves this through a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor combined with inside-out optical tracking — cameras on the headset itself scan the environment and track the player’s position in real space without external sensors.
That tracking is what makes 6DoF meaningful for a heist game. A flat-screen player “crouches” by pressing a button. A VR player physically drops below the sight line of a camera. A flat-screen player “picks up a bag” by holding a key. A VR player reaches down, grabs it, and carries it — with their arm actually bearing the weight of the motion. These interactions do not just feel more immersive; they require a different set of skills and produce a different set of errors. Fumbling a bag in VR is a physical mistake, not a button-timing mistake.
Cross-platform multiplayer between Meta Quest 3 and SteamVR headsets adds another engineering dimension: the two platforms render at different graphical fidelity levels (Quest runs on mobile-grade hardware; PCVR uses a connected gaming GPU), which means the game’s art and performance budget had to be authored to a ceiling the standalone Quest can hold, while still being playable on higher-end PC VR setups.
Starbreeze’s Bigger Bet: PAYDAY Everywhere
Aces High is one piece of a broader Starbreeze push to take PAYDAY beyond its PC and console roots. The franchise has engaged more than 50 million players worldwide and generated more than $400 million in lifetime gross revenue. After PAYDAY 3‘s difficult 2023 launch — a game that arrived with persistent connectivity problems and a rougher critical reception than its predecessor — Starbreeze has leaned heavily into IP licensing as a way to grow the brand across platforms without repeating the centralized live-service risk of a mainline sequel.
Recent months have accelerated that strategy sharply. In April 2026, Starbreeze announced a partnership with Gamefam to develop a new PAYDAY game on Roblox, aimed at the Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities that now make up Roblox’s 145 million daily active users. Just days before this article, the game Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience — a UEFN title — arrived inside Fortnite. And on August 10, Starbreeze and VICE Studios announced that Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s G-Unit Film & Television had come aboard as executive producer on a screen adaptation of the franchise — format (film or series) unconfirmed as of publication.
The VR game, the Roblox game, the Fortnite game, the TV/film adaptation — each reaching a different audience through a different format. For a franchise built on a specific experience (four people, masks on, things going wrong in the best possible way), it is an unusually active licensing moment.
What Comes After Launch
The studio has confirmed post-launch content alongside the base game. A free heist post-launch will release before the end of 2026 for all owners of the base game. Community Challenges — timed multi-week events that invite the player base to collectively complete objectives for exclusive cosmetic rewards — are also planned. The combination of a free heist drop and community challenges signals that Fast Travel intends to maintain an active live service presence, a design philosophy the flat-screen PAYDAY titles established over many years.
No price has been announced. The Steam page confirms in-game purchases alongside its base content.
How to Get Into the Closed Playtest
The closed community playtest runs exclusively on Meta Quest 3, starting August 20 and ending August 24. Slots are limited. Players interested in participating can find sign-up details on the official PAYDAY: Aces High website or by joining the official Discord server. The game is available to wishlist now on the Steam wishlist page and the Meta Horizon Store page.
Frequently Asked Questions
What VR headsets will PAYDAY: Aces High support at launch?
The game is confirmed for Meta Quest (specifically Meta Quest 3 for the closed playtest) and SteamVR headsets at launch. SteamVR support covers a range of PC VR headsets, including Valve Index and Meta Quest usedlatform multiplayer between Meta Quest and SteamVR users in the same session
What makes PAYDAY: Aces High different from the flat-screen PAYDAY games?
In a flat-screen PAYDAY game, “carrying a bag,” “aiming a weapon,” and “crouching” are all button inputs. In Aces High, those same actions engage your actual arms, hands, and body — because the game is built for six-degrees-of-freedom VR, where the headset tracks your physical position and both controllers track your hands continuously. The result is that the physical stakes of a heist — reaching for a bag under fire, physically aiming around a corner — require different skills and produce different mistakes than their button-press equivalents. Fast Travel Games designed the game from scratch to use this difference, rather than adapting an existing flat-screen entry to VR.
Is PAYDAY: Aces High a port of PAYDAY 3 or one of the earlier games?
No. PAYDAY: Aces High is an entirely new game built from the ground up for virtual reality by Fast Travel Games under license from Starbreeze Entertainment. It features new characters (The Aces), a new antagonist (Warren Jupiter), and new heist locations designed specifically for VR interaction. It is not a port of any existing PAYDAY title.
How does the PAYDAY franchise fit into Starbreeze’s current strategy?
Starbreeze has moved aggressively into IP licensing across multiple platforms simultaneously. In addition to PAYDAY: Aces High for VR, the franchise now has a presence in Roblox (a new Gamefam-developed game), in Fortnite (the UEFN Heist Escape Roguelike experience, announced August 10, 2026), and in active development of a screen adaptation with VICE Studios and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s G-Unit Film & Television as executive producer (announced August 10, 2026). Each new format extends the franchise’s reach to audiences who may not have encountered PAYDAY on PC or console, while leaving the VR and main-game development to specialist partners.
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