We don’t know exactly why VR studios are (almost) giving away their games. But one reason is obvious: they hope to get more visibility on social media and on the Quest Store.
We don’t know exactly why VR studios are (almost) giving away their games. But one reason is obvious: they hope to get more visibility on social media and on the Quest Store.
I‘m not defending them here. I‘m just saying that the Quest 2 will probably go a different way.
Most of the things they’ve ended support on were failures (Oculus Go), were sold for a very short time with not many users (Quest 1) or turned out to be not the future in their eyes (basically everything PCVR).
Quest 2 has been sold for a long time and still is, has tens of millions of users and is clearly the path that they’ve decided to focus their energy on.
Again, they absolutely shouldn’t leave people hanging and at the very least have a buy back program or something similar. I‘m not trying to excuse their behavior.
They will only support it if it makes them more money. As soon as it doesn’t, they will drop it.
Tens of millions of users can be profitable ifnthey buy stuff. However, if its just cheap games and lits of infrastructure is needed, it won’t be. Meta though they could make money off vr. They invested heavily. Its not happening and they will cur their losses.
There hasn’t been a single quarter where they’ve even broken even. Meta has been loosing billions and will continue to loose billions for the foreseeable future. They’re pumping money into VR hoping it’ll one day become an important platform they can control themselves and no longer be at the mercy of Apple or Google. They’re not in it for the money – not yet.