Biggs ᯅ

Reflecting in Tokyo with my time off... Thought hard on what happened to VR industry this past month... This is a long read: I've been in VR since 2013 when I first helped start up Survios. You can imagine how the Meta VR fallout devastated me in really unique ways. Totally and absolutely crushing. I can't even really explain it fully. It's hard to express how personal it all is being in it for so long. And I'm not saying that was smart to allow. I believed in VR too much and let it get there. The best-laid plans of mice and men, right? But this was very consequential to the entire VR gaming industry. While there are always paths to raise capital, traditional gaming is already struggling and VR focused gaming is even worse now. It's a bloodbath. For everyone. So when Meta pulled the 1st party plug I said watch 3rd party- we've already seen major shake ups. Now wait until the entire year runs it's course. This is especially so now with Steam Frame delayed and component prices rising rapidly. It all conflicts with promising myself in 2013 when I left AAA for VR it would be my only focus. VR became my requirement for opportunity. Period. I put VR first. I refused all work not VR related. It's been 13 years now in "VR only" and I've done a lot, worked on many titles, and certainly hit some dreams... And 6 years ago I started a family right into the whole 2020 turmoil. Anyone from the game industry knows the challenge of living any nornal family life. And XR as an emerging technology frankly made that dynamic even tougher. Everything since that 2020 year has slowly but surely recalibrated me. Those years added even more complex pressure as my grandparents passed away in the lockdown. I never understood it when I was young but you really do change once you have kids and really go through it. So I'm exhausted caring so much while watching apologists dismiss and sugarcoat how major this tide going out really is. As if AI glasses will save VR! "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked." Well get ready to see some birthday suits out there. Many studios are already retreating. Some will go under. So I need to be honest with myself... My framing: First I quit college and entered gamedev in 2007 to make games. It's all I ever wanted to do. Then I quit AAA and entered VR in 2013 to make the VR medium I believed in succeed. I tried the DK1 and could not stop talking about the potential of VR to the frustration of my traditional gaming peers. This crunch life I've now spent nearly 20 years in, while it has given me many gifts, has taken quite a lot of my time. My advice to hedge for new young XR devs- If I were to continue the "emerging tech" race here in XR I would go hard into AR AI design for incoming mixed reality devices. And I think they will do very well in mainstream. I would urge people interested to explore it. However, this isn't a box for my own passion. I can't pretend it is. I love VR. I love gaming. AI glasses do not excite me. Even traditional gaming is a better fit for me than glasses tech. This all puts me at my current decision- I will adjust my efforts and shift to XR being a great feature of my games, not the focus, and this will also reflect in my posting which will evolve toward more traditional gaming. So instead of putting all the eggs in one basket like launching first on Quest platform or even try to shift as a Steam Frame exclusive, I'll instead build traditional flat with "VR as a feature" Anyone who knows me well will understand how hard this decision was. But as an avid PC/PCVR gamer, I'm going to my gaming roots first. I don't see a path for me with glasses tech being pushed everywhere. Can't lie to myself and fake enthusiasm for emerging tech I'm not that interested in. I'm not going into mobile apps or building for a generative AI platform. I'm here to create what only games can. I want people to experience worlds.

@itsfrozenwaffle Yeah the series of events is not building confidence to say the least

@SpatialBiggs It doesn't help that now boz is saying that horizon worlds was never the metaverse even though that is exactly what they made us believe.

Does no one else suspect this retreat to maintain VR Meta Horizon is simply due to the bottom suddenly falling out of VR market too rapidly? That this is an attempt to underpin an incoming VR content shortage? While some say win, I think the real story here is the "why now"

@SadlyItsBradley Lot of 2026 left to go

Ubisoft is ceasing game development operations for the studio that created all of their major VR games such as: • Werewolves Within (2016) • Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017) • Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR (2023) 105 employees were let go in this restructuring

Blizzard should put up a tomb not joking

@itsfrozenwaffle It makes Meta-only release a terrifying proposition. When you spend months and years on content there is an expectation of platform stability.

@SpatialBiggs It just continues to solidify the argument that meta and boz have no idea what they are doing. You keep pivoting like this and people will lose confidence. I know I have.

@AndyMorphs @StormyCsVR That's a pretty good point too

@SpatialBiggs @StormyCsVR I think they realised how much horizon worlds is baked into the Meta Horizon os and thought, crap that a lot of work to remove it.

@KennyRoy Yep see the same. It's not just VR, gaming in general, but it's a now a niche of niche

@SpatialBiggs All I know is VR investment is drier than a desert, and it's this inconsistent messaging that is doing it.

@SaoGalaxyVr Agree should have always been

@SpatialBiggs I think it's just an easy decision . It's just going to be a standalone app as it should have been. Every thing else they said still stands about it being removed from the os layer. As of the last update the feed is gone and the store now starts up . To many people taken this ooc

@EinarJohnson_XR Fair points for sure

From a business sense it makes sense to keep it and maybe roll those users into something new further down the line vs. canceling it and having them migrate to other platforms or apps. Killing it never made sense to me. Still....I wouldn't miss it if it were to disappear completely.

Chuck Norris didn’t die, he left to kick the Grim Reaper’s ass RIP Chuck 🫡

@KathyRaynaVR Bad press, cancelled projects, sudden retraction of investment, and general crashing of developer interest could have paused the full sunsetting. It's quite a symptom to see a quick pivot like this either way.

@SpatialBiggs Yep, this is definitely a backtrack on completely axing the VR portion of Horizon Worlds. Since they already stripped it from the Horizon OS, the only way to backtrack was to just re-release it as an app and pray no one notices why they did it.

It's only March.

@EinarJohnson_XR - Not cost $300 😆

Wish list for Vision Pro Dev Strap Gen 3: - Powers Vision Pro (from M5 Studio / Pro) - Pass live stream video that AI can review for code improvement - Length approximately 1.5 meters (5') - Braided cable less likely to twist and bind (Sigh, I can dream.)

The expectation set for VR is dead. The reality of VR is very much alive. VR’s main utility to mainstream tech is that it’s easy to dunk on. But VR's biggest users are kids and teens. And for the first time in modern tech, we’re pretending teens aren’t where the trend starts? If you think VR is dead, play a top 10 free-to-play VR game, join its Discord, and watch a @jmancurly video. VR isn't a dead category. You’re looking in the wrong places.

I'll go a step further: Horizon Worlds being shut down is the best news possible for consumer VR Meta's insistence to both own the platform (Quest + OS) and the first-party content (Horizon Worlds) created a palpable COI and routinely undercut third-party devs (i.e. the groups making the ecosystem successful) With Horizon Worlds out of the way, hopefully Meta aligns its own interests with that of 3p devs (to the end of producing more content users are actually interested in)

NVIDIA's Cloud Gaming Now Supports up to 90 FPS on Quest, Vision Pro & Pico Headsets See more 👉roadtovr.com/geforce-now-qu…

As someone who worked at Reality Labs: the Metaverse had real legs but was obliterated by middle management completely out of touch with how young people actually use technology. I built a V1 tool that game developers genuinely needed, and the moment it was done, it got shipped to a team in London (to die), and I was reassigned to a "higher-priority project" that zero developers asked for. Multiply that by every team, and you'll understand why this never took off yet cost 80 billion.