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.
DK2 was released in 2014. By 2015 we had tech demos of VR internet browsers and hacks to make 80% of older games somewhat playable.
And then nothing. Just 10 years of shovelware and tech demos. We got what, vrchat, beat saber, hl Alyx, and Boneworks? SkyrimVR was somehow a sucess despite being even junkies than the og skyrim?
The brilliant people in the Flat2VR discord server pop up in gaming news periodically for adding VR to games not built with it in mind. Just about any game built on UE4/5 and RE can conceivably have VR added using their mods. The footage I've seen from the most recent Resident Evil looks pants-shittingly horrifying in VR.
Dreams would have been awesome if it had its PC port. It needed a critical mass of users, being stuck on PS4 killed it.
Even better that it's not strictly VR, just able to do it.
I am not into "social VR" so I can't really comment on that (but it does seem like all junk), but there are plenty of good single player PCVR games these days. In fact I have quite a backlog of good VR games I can't seem to find the time to finish.
IMHO with the hopefully soon release of the Steam Frame and other (shitty) vendors scaling back their involvement, a refocus on actual VR gaming is coming and that is a good thing.