Virtual Reality

The Seattle, Washington-based studio says it had to reduce the size of the company after the cancellation of a major project and lack of funding.

In a statement on its LinkedIn company page, Polyarc Games, the makers of the Moss games and most recently Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss, announced it has to reduce its staff. The specific passage in the statement reads as follows:

After an unsuccessful team-wide effort to secure funding following the cancellation of a major project, we had to make the decision to significantly reduce the size of the company. This means we’re saying goodbye to many talented people who have been a meaningful part of what we’ve built.

The startup behind Rec Room announced the imminent closure of its network on June 1.

In the closure note, copied below in its entirety to save for posterity, Rec Room promised a tool available from Steam in about a week allowing creators to download their room and invention data “in formats that can help you recreate the room elsewhere if you choose." It’s important to note that while Meta leadership changed course to keep Horizon Worlds online after first announcing closure on a similar timescale, they still have made no similar promise that would allow creators to download their work for use elsewhere.

Dr. Ruth Diaz noted in a post on this site that Meta still needs to make amends to its Horizon creators, writing that it should “give creators full ability to export and move their worlds, complete and intact, to other applications. Unwall the gardens before you abandon them.”

As long-time believers in VR feel the air sucked out of their lungs at the 10-year anniversary of PC VR, Good VR reached out to VRChat for comment and received the following statement:

These are hard times for the space, and our hearts go out to the Rec Room team and their community. For Horizon Worlds, regardless of where it lands, this instability is tough on its creators, players, and team. Building social platforms is really difficult work, and these moments deeply affect real people. VRChat is in a strong position. We're continuing to grow, hitting new concurrency records, and actively investing in the platform. What's kept us here is our community -- their creativity, their ingenuity, and the fact that they show up every single day. We don't take that for granted. VRChat is not going anywhere. We're hiring, and we're building for the long term.

The top news of the week is one that hurts me to write… but it is my job to inform you all, so I’ll go on. Lynx, the promising French startup producing standalone MR headsets, has entered the liquidation phase. I found the news on Reddit and was able to confirm it on some French websites dedicated to companies and their status.

The news makes me very sad: the team at Lynx was nice and talented (I personally know a few of them, including the CEO), and they were making the only standalone MR headset made in Europe. It’s frustrating that such a company was not supported enough, in this period where Europe is trying to become relevant in the technology field. They also made their share of mistakes with the launch of the first headset, but I was hoping that they could use the lessons learned to have a smoother launch of the second device.

Many people are wondering if the promised Lynx R2, announced just a couple of months ago, will ever see the light of day. Well, having been part of a company that went through a liquidation, too, I can tell you that the only hope we have is that the assets related to the headset get bought by another company interested in launching the device under its umbrella. I sincerely hope this happens, and I also hope this new eventual company re-hires part of the original Lynx team. Let’s see what is going to happen.

The report from VRcoast claims that micro-OLED display maker SeeYA Technology plans to clear its existing production lines to dedicate its full capacity to the display for Meta's next headset.

SeeYA is the provider of the micro-OLED displays in Bigscreen's Beyond headsets, both generations, which are also 2560×2560.

It's unclear whether, if the report's claims are true, the dedication of SeeYA's production lines would affect Bigscreen's supply availability. We've reached out to Bigscreen to ask about the report's claims and we'll update this article if we get a response.

If the report is accurate, this will be Meta's first ever headset to use micro-OLED, and its first non-LCD headset since the original Oculus Quest all the way back in 2019.

Horizon Worlds, Meta's first pass at a metaverse, will be inaccessible via virtual reality headset after June 15, 2026. The company shared plans to separate Horizon Worlds from Quest VR platform and focus exclusively on the smartphone version of the app in February, and now in a new post on its community forums, Meta detailed when the VR version of Horizon Worlds will be deprecated.

By March 31, Meta says individual Horizon Worlds and Events will no longer be listed in the Quest's Store and headset owners will be unable to visit worlds like "Horizon Central, Events Arena, Kaiju and Bobber Bay." Then, after June 15, the app will be removed from Quest headsets and worlds will be completely unavailable to visit in VR. From that point on, the easiest place to visit Horizon Worlds will be in the Meta Horizon app for iOS and Android.

A hardware hacker group previously behind the PSVR2Toolkit says it’s effectively “jailbroken” PSVR 2 for PC.

When Sony released its PC adapter for PSVR 2 in 2024, it released the headset from PS5 exclusivity, allowing users to play SteamVR games on VR-ready PCs for the first time.

Still, Sony didn’t release enable every hardware capability, with tethered PC gameplay notably lacking features such as eye-tracking, HDR, and headset rumble.

Now, the hardware hacker group previously associated with the PSVR2Toolkit—an open source driver toolkit interfacing with Sony’s PSVR 2 PC support—claims to have “jailbroken” the PSVR 2.

Beyond 2 and Beyond 2e were announced almost exactly a year ago, with preorders opening immediately. Originally it was set to ship in April 2025, but a PCB design flaw led to a roughly 3 month delay, with shipping finally beginning in late June.

The startup has spent the 9 months since then fulfilling the backlog of preorders, with new orders taking months and then weeks to ship. Now, Bigscreen says it has completed this phase, with new Beyond 2 shipping within days. The exact shipping time depends on which facial interface you opt for.

The fastest option, Bigscreen says, is ordering with the Halo Mount and Universal-Fit Cushion. Priced $60 higher than the Custom-Fit Cushion, this option gives you a halo strap and a cushion designed to suit anyone's face. Bigscreen says it now ships within 1-2 days, and sometimes even on the same day.

If you want the Bigscreen signature Custom-Fit Cushion instead, customized for your face based on an iPhone TrueDepth face scan you provide, that should take slightly longer, 2-3 days on average.

"In some cases due to SKU, color, accessory, or regional variability, orders may take a week to ship", the startup notes, and orders with prescription lens inserts will still take multiple weeks.

If you're not familiar with the Little Nightmares franchise, it is a series of puzzle-based platform horror games played in third person. Altered Echoes bridges off the stories of the first two games. Without getting too deep into spoilers, Altered Echoes stars Dark Six, the dark corrupted version of Six, who starred in the first game and is a prominent part of the second. As it was explained to me, Dark Six is on a journey to reunite with Six.

Overall, this demo was terrific. Visually, the game looked great in the PS VR2. The closest adjacent experience I have played in VR is Out Of Sight, which similarly plays with world scale and would be a good primer to check out before Little Nightmares drops next month. Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is scheduled for release on April 24. The game can be wishlisted now on Quest, PS VR2, and Steam.

Prolific VR modder Luke Ross has re-released his R.E.A.L. VR mod suite following a DMCA takedown issued by CD Projekt in January for his paywalled Cyberpunk 2077 VR mod—this time making a bulk of the work free for anyone to download.

The Daily Dot reports Muppet*Vision 3D is coming to the Apple Vision Pro and other VR headsets. The virtual reality rendition of the show, which Disney filmed ahead of its shuttering, will (almost) recreate the real thing. The show was actually a 4D experience, as it involved not only animatronics but a live action performer and bubbles. While we’d still like to see it return in a new recreated Muppet Theater someday, as Brian Henson recently said during a Q&A, this version is “better than it not coming to VR.”

According to Henson, the virtual reality show will also let users “sit” anywhere they want while watching. That will matter when we turn our heads around to look behind us. (As the kids say, IYKYK.)

Enver Studio has announced that its popular multiplayer VR motocross racing game MotoX is now free-to-play on Quest. Since launching in 2023, MotoX has built a strong reputation and collected over 23,000 reviews and a 4.9-star rating on Meta's platform.

The decision to move to a free-to-play model comes alongside a wider industry trend: multiplayer-focused VR titles that prioritize social interaction are increasingly outperforming traditional paid releases.

Valve’s upcoming standalone VR headset Steam Frame is still shipping sometime this year, the company says, as it is now marked as “coming soon” on the Steam backend.

In a hardware news update last month, Valve announced that Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all being affected by the wider RAM and storage component shortage. Parts woes notwithstanding, Valve said in February that its goal was still to ship in the first half of 2026.

Now, according to the Steam backend (via SteamDB), Valve ha marked all three of its forthcoming products as “coming soon.”

Whether that means “soon soon” or “Valve soon” remains to be seen, although the company gave another vote of confidence in release plans in last week’s 2025 Year in Review.

Every month, Sony publishes a blog detailing the top ten downloads of the month on all of its platforms, with separate lists for US/Canada and the EU. On PS VR2, there are some games that appear every month: Beat Saber, Job Simulator, and Pavlov are mainstays on this list, with others like Horizon Call of the Mountain, Metro Awakening, and Creed: Rise To Glory drifting in and out of the top ten month to month.

Alien: Rogue Incursion, from developer Survios (Creed, Puzzle Bobble, The Walking Dead: Onslaught), has also been a steady presence in the top 10 since its release in December 2024. It ranked fourth in the US/Canada and fifth in the EU in January 2026, and fifth on both lists for December 2025.

Veteran developer nDreams has announced another mass restructuring that will result in two of its three studios shutting down and a staff reduction of up to seventy-eight employees at all levels, 'including senior leadership.' This is the troubled studio's third round of layoffs, following similar restructurings in 2024 and 2025. nDreams Compass and nDreams Near Light will be closed with nDreams Elevation remaining as the core business focus moving forward.

March is chock full of existing games finding homes on new platforms, games we first got a look at during the first Steam Next Fest in 2026, and the VR return of one of the most popular sci-fi franchises ever.

These dates were sourced from a combination of developer posts, store listings, and press releases and are subject to change. We will update this article if and when any dates are changed.

“Many of the people who might say I failed them would say so because they loved things that I gave them, and are mad that the gravy train has come to a stop. But I still respect that,” Bosworth says.

But it’s not the first-party studio closures and near full-stop on VR game funding that Bosworth thinks is the failure: it’s customer acquisition.

“I don’t think I failed them because obviously they’re already fans. They love the work. The people that argue that I’ve failed are not yet VR gaming fans, who I think could be—who we hoped would be by now, but who aren’t.”

The failure, in Bosworth’s eyes, is not having created the right product for people who haven’t already adopted VR.

“And I haven’t built the right thing, or the right software to get them into the ecosystem. That is the failure. That is what we’re trying to attack in new and different ways: is to grow the base, to make this thing sustainable.”

Virtual reality is incredibly effective at making you feel immersed in the fiction of games. Rather than watching events unfold on a screen a couple of meters away, there’s a sense of being part of the action in a way that simply isn’t possible using a TV. Not all genres are affected equally though, and while shooters, driving games, and flight sims can all lay easy claim to being radically enhanced in VR, how does that work with tower defence?

A bit like playing Sony’s classic platform game, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, which placed you in the middle of its charming robotic world, hopping your bot rescuing droid around the space where you were sitting, the original Iron Guard had you roaming a virtual battlefield about the size of squash court. In your right hand you held a drone with a laser you could use to help defend your base, while your left hand held a controller that let you build and upgrade turrets.

Scudding about the battlefield, you could quickly move towards any area causing you trouble, adding towers or using your miniature spaceship to pump rounds into mobs. But there was always an odd tension between holding what felt like a toy-sized ship, and a disembodied game controller of a similar size, while hovering over industrial sites that were meant to be a representation of the real world.

In Short: Absorbing VR tower defence that improves on the original game in almost every department, but is let down by a pointless, tacked on narrative.

Pros: Good variety of enemies, mission goals, and turrets. Graphically crisp with detailed structures and attractive settings. Impressively polished all round, in terms of gameplay and visuals.

Cons: Abysmal dialogue and voice-acting; glitched conversations have characters interrupting each other. No multiplayer.

Score: 7/10

Firmware dataminers Luna and Samulia discovered a "hilariously" low resolution depiction of the headset from the rear side (see above), as well as a silhouette of the frontbox from behind. The pair were also able to activate and run the eye tracking calibration setup on a Quest Pro.

While the resolution is indeed comically low, it still clearly depicts a compact headset with glasses-style nose pads instead of a classic VR-style face pad. Discovered strings also reference adjusting the nose pads for comfort. What we don't see is the back of the device, so it's not yet clear whether it has glasses-like arms or a cradle for the back of your head.

This is the first chance for many players to try popular upcoming titles for the first time like Beyond Frames' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City.

Some of the participating games released demos prior to the start of Next Fest, like Echoes of Mora, Alliance Tales: Battle For The Frontier, Birdseed VR, and How To God.

Please note that this list was provided two weeks ago by Valve and is subject to change. Developers can (and previously have) drop out of Next Fest if their demo is not ready or release a demo on short notice.

Meta, after laying off about 10 percent of its Reality Labs division, closing three VR studios, stopping new content for VR fitness app Supernatural, and discontinuing its metaverse for work, is announcing a major change for its Horizon Worlds metaverse platform. Instead of attempting to make the 3D social platform work for both VR and mobile, Meta is “explicitly separating” its “Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform” and “shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile,” Samantha Ryan, Reality Labs’ VP of content, says in a blog post.

The new approach sets Meta up to better compete with platforms like Roblox and Fortnite, which also offer user-generated experiences that can be played on your phone. Horizon Worlds originally launched for VR, but “to truly change the game and tap into a much larger market, we’re going all-in on mobile.”

Project Swan is going to be Pico’s next flagship XR headset, the company says in its GDC session description, which is also slated to run PICO OS 6, the next version of the company’s Android-based operating system.

While the company hasn’t expressly said it will also reveal Project Swan’s hardware at GDC in March, Pico says it will provide “an overview of Project Swan’s graphics performance, multimodal interaction system, and developer toolchain, as well as practical guidance on bringing existing apps or games into spatial computing workflows,” which is set to include “concrete examples and live demos.”

“This session introduces the core OS and platform capabilities that enable developers—from XR specialists to non-XR app, web, and game creators—to build or adapt content for this emerging medium,” Pico says. “It presents a new paradigm for spatial experiences in which games and apps coexist, allowing a primary experience to run alongside companion applications in a shared environment.”