Virtual Reality

[Asura]

https://www.roadtovr.com/civilizatio...-date-trailer/

In two minds about this.

On the one hand, VR mixed reality board games can be great. I've played mutliplayer Demeo quite a bit.

On the other hand, I associate Civilisation with a laid-back type of gameplay, played over ~10 hour stints. It's the kind of game that melts away time off and turns 7pm magically into 4am... But the Quest 3 only has a ~2.5hr battery life.

[Neon Ignition]

https://bsky.app/profile/nathievr.bsky.social/post/3licnwqjxsk2p

[Asura]

Meta again demonstrate that (1) their technically quite profound social VR space just looks naff to the man-in-the-street and (2) they're trying to sell something people in general just don't want.

Apparently even at their own company, when they gave out headsets to everyone and set up those meeting spaces (which, as I said, do have some technical merit - you could use the back of the Quest Pro controllers in reverse, they have a 'nib' on the bottom, and can draw on virtual whiteboards - it's technically interesting), no-one wanted to use it, and they all just used the regular headphones/mic/webcams meetings instead.

I'm a big fan of social-VR. I often work from home and sometimes, I'll jump on various VR multiplayer things at lunchtime to break up the silence in the middle of the day. But Horizon Worlds really is a boondoggle. It's mindboggling how much money they've spent on it at this stage, and they're fallen to the sunk cost fallacy - if they admit it's a failure, the shareholders are going to look very closely at the costs.

[wakka]

That is the worst ad I have ever seen for anything ever in my whole life.

[MartyG]

There is definitely a market for virtual environments, VRChat has had an upward trending line for the last 6 years, and it remains in the top 30 of Steam highest players: https://steamdb.info/app/438100/charts/#6y

Meta isn't stupid, it clearly sees value in putting effort into the R&D; these things are valuable in terms of IP and patents (regardless of how many people are using it) and investors in Meta are hardly crying at their returns (Meta is immensely profitable).

[wakka]

I don't think the fact that a competitor product is making the top 30 (30!) on the Steam most-played chart is much of an endorsement of Horizon Worlds if I'm honest.

At the scale at which Meta operates, Horizon Worlds is doomed to be completely irrelevant to revenue. With the absolute mountain of cash that floods into Meta's coffers every day thanks to their near-monopoly on social media advertising, though, they have to be seen to be spending it somewhere - and this is probably as good as anywhere else.

Apart from anything else though, Horizon Worlds just looks like a bad product. Like it just looks, idk, ****? It's honestly dispiriting to see that amount of money be spent on something so utterly degenerate in its crapness.

[Asura]

There is definitely a market for virtual environments, VRChat has had an upward trending line for the last 6 years, and it remains in the top 30 of Steam highest players: https://steamdb.info/app/438100/charts/#6y

Meta isn't stupid, it clearly sees value in putting effort into the R&D; these things are valuable in terms of IP and patents (regardless of how many people are using it) and investors in Meta are hardly crying at their returns (Meta is immensely profitable).

Ties into what I said above (VRChat). It's massive with kids & teens on TikTok who make video content in it, for example.

Horizon Worlds looks like this weird sanitised corporate thing, but that conceals a very advanced set of technical underpinnings. VRChat leans very heavily on Unity as its editor; you can't even create avatars or worlds within the actual game. Horizon Worlds is more like Second Life, where they're trying to make everything within the actual engine itself, which is orders of magnitude more complex. Plus, even some of the more advanced games in VRChat are pretty janky. HW also has features to support large numbers of simultaneous players and distributed broadcasting of VR avatars for things like concerts. These things are all technically profound.

[MartyG]

And it's why the patents are likely more valuable than the product, hence why Meta is investing in this stuff.

[wakka]

I think whatever could be found down the back of my sofa (usually heavily indexed on bottle caps, receipts, and socks my dog has stolen) has got more value than the product 😂

But yes I agree they will probably derive some value from the patents around it. I'm a massive believer in head/eye mounted technology overtaking the relative crudity of poking at handheld smartphones down the line, and immersive communication products will - eventually - be a part of that I'm sure.

Horizon Worlds ain't it, though, and I'd be reluctant to fully endorse the idea that this is all part of a clever grand plan by Meta to secure all the patents via some sort of Trojan horse. I think we can say, yes, they prob are getting some good patents out of it, and yet it is also simultaneously true that it is a massive **** up and a godawful product. These tech megacorps are very far from infallible. Thanks to operating near-monopolies though, they can afford to absorb them.

EDIT: Sorry if I'm coming across as argumentative, I don't mean to, this is just my speech style which doesn't always come across well in text - I am being jokey rather than arsey and enjoying the discussion!

[Brad]

I was forced to use Horizon Worlds at a previous job (investigating the metaverse) and it was the worst and least populated of all the systems I had to research. VRChat was super busy but it was just insane. There was a younger person I was doing the investigation with and they'd never used VR before. I warned them that it could be a pretty lawless place and we had no control over what they might see. The VERY first thing they saw in VRChat was someone dressed as a cat but with a strap-on.

[Neon Ignition]

https://www.roadtovr.com/meta-connect-2025-dates-what-to-expect/

https://www.roadtovr.com/vr-games-showcase-returns-march-11th-featuring-hitman-for-psvr-2-flat2vr-games-more/

https://www.roadtovr.com/max-mustard-studio-lays-off-majority-of-staff-closes-office-vows-to-continue-work-on-xr-games/

https://www.roadtovr.com/metro-awakening-underperforms-embracer-group-quest-3-steam-psvr-2/

[Asura]

https://www.roadtovr.com/max-mustard...k-on-xr-games/

https://www.roadtovr.com/metro-awake...-steam-psvr-2/

Yeah, it's a funny one.

The Max Mustard thing, alone, wouldn't be the best example. The studio ran for years on the strength of 1 game, Richie's Plank Experience, which is the very definition of the sorts of thin, basic experience that plagued the VR platforms in the early years - even if it's basically the best one, or among the best, and one of the games I would argue every Quest user should own.

Then the actual Max Mustard game was a third-person platformer, kinda like Astro Bot or Moss, which is very good! But it's also a third-person platformer in VR; I personally had zero interest in it and maybe what we're seeing is that this sort of game, generally, isn't a big draw. Some have done well, like Moss or Down the Rabbit Hole, but they weren't really platformers, more kinda story/puzzle experiences, and I also feel that its mascot wasn't appealing.

Max Mustard had a troubled launch though, which Meta deserve to take the flak for - it came out, and almost immediately became one of the highest rated games on the Quest store, but sold really poorly because the store didn't push it in any of the "new release" spots. The developer had to do a drastic thing where they gave away a bunch of free copies then slashed it to 90% off, after which it finally started to show up in the store, and then apparently Sony came knocking to ask for a PSVR2 version, which did get top billing on PSN and went on to sell reasonably well (enough for the dev to justify making it, apparently).

But Metro too, after it won "VR game of the year" on Steam... We're seeing this from numerous directions; too many games are coming out on VR, arguably are good, but just aren't selling enough to justify being made. I think right now it'd be a very risky proposition to make a game of any real expense on the Quest platform, and I say that reluctantly as a fan.

[Neon Ignition]

Yep, the path for anything with a reasonable budget behind does seem to be continuing to narrow. Like the previous years Assassins Creed game, IP isn't helping them to sell either. Thankfully Batman seems to have been a hit. We've done well having a few years on the back of notable releases at the tail end of each year, maybe they need to spread out more instead of pushing so hard on just Xmas season sales.

[Asura]

Like the previous years Assassins Creed game,

Admittedly, I'm weird on this one. Ubisoft said it was "disappointing", but they have a weird reputation in recent years for over-development, basically not being frugal on development costs and spending too much time/money.

I know how many Ubisoft had sold pre-Christmas due to a data leak, and frankly if you track that back to a revenue figure, it would've been quite a lot for most devs. But most importantly that was pre-Christmas when the game was kinda the star title for the Quest 3's release. I would love to know what the figures were like, by, say, March the following year.

[Dogg Thang]

Thankfully Batman seems to have been a hit.

Were the numbers inflated by them giving it away with the Quest 3? It's the Wii Sports of Quest.