SideQuest makes third-party software some owners of Quest headsets use to load up custom home spaces, classic games modded for VR support, and other unofficial content. The software relies on a component of the Android ecosystem, ADB, for managing a standalone VR headset from a companion device. To use the feature with Meta headsets you also have to specify you're a developer to install it.
We confirmed the layoffs with SideQuest CEO Shane Harris during a live episode of VR Download. Harris told us the process is still ongoing and asked to give us details next week.
We recently joined SideQuest's Banter social software to learn about their AI generation experiments. What we saw in there was an impressive proof of concept for voice to 3D object generation, coming just a few days before the layoffs.
We've asked Harris how many have been let go in total and will have more next week once we've verified more information.
If you have information you'd like to share with UploadVR you can reach us via tips@uploadvr.com. We don't respond to all messages, but we do make use of that information and thank those who share facts openly with us.
Meta responded to developer concerns over discoverability and sales on its platform with a blog post detailing the rise of in-app purchases and free-to-play content.
A blog post from Meta's Samantha Ryan, VP of Metaverse Content, claims "people spent more time on average in Quest 3S devices than any other headset at launch" and "total payment volume on the platform rose 12% in 2024, driven by significant growth of in-app purchases."
The figure gives useful context to our in-depth report talking with nearly two dozen developers struggling with visibility on Meta's platform. Meta's blog post terms these dev works "premium" products among free Horizon Worlds destinations, as Meta transitions toward supporting Horizon OS with third-party hardware in addition to the company's own Quest headsets.
"We don’t think F2P will replace premium apps — both models are likely to coexist," Ryan wrote. "These models are fighting for a share of consumer wallets and as competition heats up, we’re committed to fostering an ecosystem where all kinds of business models can succeed."
You can check out the full post on Meta's site from Ryan, who joined the company about a year ago to "lead the growth and evolution of our software strategy for the metaverse".
The post suggests "young people" are a "growing share of new users" and "contributing to the rise of free-to-play titles" as well as in using Horizon Worlds.
"This shift signals a growing opportunity for new business models," Ryan wrote. "A broader range of people are buying Quests, and this expansion has changed some of the tenets of our ecosystem that were previously taken for granted. It has also created important new opportunities for developers and creators."
The post also mentions a 10% rise in time users spent in media apps, with Amazon Prime added last year to quickly become a "top 10 2D app by time spent on the platform".
"In 2024, existing Meta Quest owners drove a wave of device sales as they upgraded from earlier models, accounting for 27% of Quest 3 and 20% of Quest 3S users for the year," Meta noted. "These customers have high expectations for fidelity and gravitate to premium titles that feature high production value, and we continue to see strong performance for titles like The Thrill of the Fight 2 and Contractors Showdown that appeal to this audience."
The majority of new devices sold in 2024, Meta says, "were people getting their first Quest headset. As so many newcomers enter the market, the well-known attributes of VR enthusiasts no longer represent the full Quest userbase."
The post also recaps a number of recent updates and tests, like changes to the store interface to makes store apps "more visible on the front page of the Horizon mobile app" as well as "enabling developers to opt-in to platform sales".
"To reach younger audiences looking for fun, social, free-to-play experiences, we’re expanding the ways you can build and monetize in Horizon Worlds," the post notes.
Walkabout Mini Golf development studio Mighty Coconut told UploadVR that 50% of its revenue is from paid DLC content, with January being the best DLC sales month ever for the company.
"In-app purchases are incredibly important for revenue but also for keeping players engaged and coming back for fresh new experiences and worlds to explore," Walkabout creator Lucas Martell said. "It keeps things active and alive, and has allowed us to expand the game far beyond our wildest dreams."
We've still got some unanswered questions about the direction of Meta's ecosystem and will be following up in the days ahead.
Ahoy! From Picardy is an invitation to start again in spatial storytelling.
The project from Daniel Jones is available now on Apple Vision Pro headsets priced $5.99. The story Jones tells here made me laugh and cry in its 16-minute runtime, and I recommend it to Vision Pro owners as a standout example of a story playing out in space with the lightest interaction to progress the story.
After Apple's own immersive content, which includes captured media like the Super Bowl, and NBA games, a performance by The Weeknd, and the fully scripted immersive short film Submerged, I'm likely to put guests in my headset through Ahoy! From Picardy to give them a powerful introduction to spatial storytelling. While Job Simulator is always a great introduction to VR as well, particularly with hand tracking, I might actually make Ahoy! From Picardy the first thing I put people inside when they try Apple's headset. That's because I can watch along more easily on a nearby device than I can with Apple's DRM'd content. You can watch about a minute of the story on this little island below, featuring some of its memorable music, because the app didn't restrict capture.
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I haven't been affected this deeply by spatial storytelling since Dear Angelica, and the poetry here in Picardy will sit with me a long while. Jones' project is a strong example of what's possible when you combine so many different art forms tailored for the free exploration of a single viewer. I can't remember leaning in to cry before, but I did here, and walking around the diorama-scale story is a wonder too.
I'll not spoil too much more about this tale, which is described as a "music-driven, linear narrative short film" by its creators with "subtle interactive elements" and a movable stage that can be repositioned to view from any angle. The app's description notes:
"This project embraces groundbreaking techniques to celebrate the arrival of spatial storytelling-a world of light layered over our physical world. It combines hand-made physical models (3D-scanned into the digital space), hand-painted backdrops, and elegantly simplified characters with hand-painted textures-all creating a uniquely warm and approachable experience."
I would like to see some better transitions included as there seemed to be a jarring few seconds between a few of the scenes, as assets seemed to load. It is a minor complaint, though, and while the experience overtakes your headset by disallowing multitasking, Picardy makes use of that focus to utter delight. I’m unlikely to boot up AHOY! again for myself unless they add more content, but the story works as is.
E McNeill released the first full VR game for Gear VR headsets back in 2014 drawing from big screen depictions of cyberspace.
Featuring hackers taking on the "Darknet" to acquire virtual bitcoin, his strategy game sees you hack computing nodes to purchase stronger electronic weapons.
At the time of Darknet's original development in 2013 and 2014, a single actual bitcoin could be sold for about $1,000 in the real world. At the time of our talk on January 31, 2025, more than a decade after McNeill originally made the game, a single bitcoin could be sold for more than $100,000.
This means if McNeill had acquired, say, five bitcoin at a cost of $5,000 at the time he added the concept to Darknet, the cryptocurrency would be worth $500,000 today.
McNeill says he acquired no bitcoin.
Instead, he spent the last 12 years as an indie game developer making the first full VR game for Gear VR followed by a series of VR titles for most modern consumer VR headsets.
"There was maybe a brief moment in time when I felt like I was doing super awesome and had struck it rich, and that moment has passed. Maybe if I had bought bitcoin like we talked about at the beginning of this interview then all would be different," McNeill said of his journey in indie game development. "The fact that I've been able to keep it going already for 12 years is miraculous to me, and I think if I went back and talked to my younger self and said 'if you set out on this you'll be able to make this work for at least 12 years', I would consider that a dream come true."
Before McNeill heads off on leave, Don Hopper booted up Darknet: Remastered on Quest alongside McNeill's most recent action games Ironstrike and Ironlights. I interviewed the developer for more than an hour with Don playing each of the games in the background.
Eventually, McNeill met up with Don and taught us how to cast spells and succeed in combat. The dev gave Don a crash course tutorial in both Ironstrike and Ironlights, and McNeill showed us why he made such specific choices when it comes to weapon handling in his VR games. Our thanks to YouTube member Arlen for joining us with some questions during the show, and you can check out the full timestamped hour-long conversation with McNeill below.
Last week, we heard from the developer of Airspace Defender and Tablecraft in the same deep dive format and, in the weeks ahead, we're starting to line up a schedule for developer interviews that should include us looking at brand new or upcoming releases.
We only played three of McNeill's games during the stream, jumping from Darknet: Remastered to Ironstrike and finally ending in Ironlights, but you can learn more about all of his titles on his website.
We'll be sure to follow up with McNeill in the months ahead.
E McNeill's VR classic Darknet finally made the jump to Quest headsets as Darknet: Remastered.
The trailer for Darknet is embedded below and you'll want to take particular note of the timestamp on its publication of October 6, 2014. Darknet was the first full game to launch on Samsung Gear VR, which is considered to be the first consumer VR headset. In the three years following, it launched on the Oculus Rift Store, the original PlayStation VR, Steam, and Google Daydream, an early pioneer of cross-platform VR availability.
I took the game for a spin on Quest and it is just as I remember it. Described by its creator as "a strategy/puzzle game in which you play as an elite hacker in the Net," the game sees players "Plug into cyberspace, using viruses, worms, and exploits to steal the data before your signal gets traced." Inspirations include TRON, Neuromancer, The Matrix, and Johnny Mnemonic, and it won a VR Jam all the way back in 2013.
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McNeill's forward-thinking project, which works great seated in a swivel chair, was a stand-out first-time experience for many buyers of the Gear VR Innovator Edition. For me, whenever I gather a bunch of windows around myself in a modern Quest or Vision Pro headset, a part of me still thinks back to the vibe of McNeill's early hacker role-play managing nodes in Darknet.
After Darknet, McNeill made a number of impressive VR projects including Tactera, Skylight, Astraeus, Ironlights and Ironstrike, and you can learn more about them all on his website.
VR's first major massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and one of its longest-running multiplayer experiences, is shutting down across all platforms.
An announcement post on the OrbusVR forums from one of the project's long-time developers states that server shutdown is in April, with sales ending February 10th across all platforms.
OrbusVR: Reborn's listing on Steam already notes the imminent end to sales but there's no such notice on the Quest store listing. I emailed Meta to ask if they're in contact with the developers about changing the page. I also asked if Meta is planning to refund buyers for what they've spent to buy one of the first paid MMORPGs in VR.
As of this writing, the project is still priced $19.99 on both storefronts. OrbusVR: Reborn carried "mostly positive" reviews since release in April 2019 on Steam, and it launched with the original Quest headset as well in May 2019.
On the shutdown announcement page the developer writes:
"In the coming months leading to the server shutdown, we will be planning a few farewell events, including increased drop rates on legendaries, unlocking the DLC for all players that may not have experienced it yet, and hosting the last official Mage Tournament in-game. While we are truly sad to say goodbye to this game, we want to celebrate the fun, friends, and memories that have been experienced in our games’ long history. We plan on doing an end of game wrapup, sharing stats like total hours played, monsters killed, etc., in the coming months.
UploadVR Senior Editor Henry Stockdale is leading the charge as we talk with VR and mixed reality developers on an ongoing basis about the state of the market. We're still seeing groundbreaking new software across most platforms, but some devs are laying off workers and shutting down their projects as they struggle with a rapidly changing market for VR and mixed reality content. In 2025, he's already covered layoffs at Soul Assembly and will have more nuanced coverage of the issues facing developers in the weeks ahead.
We'll be discussing the shutdown of OrbusVR on our VR Gamescast show tomorrow on YouTube, and if you're an Orbus player we'd love to hear from you about the time you've spent fishing, crafting or just plain hanging out with friends in the first VRMMORPG.
Not Suspicious developer Rafael Brochado joined UploadVR for a deep dive into the development of two innovative games from his studio.
Airspace Defender is a paid mixed reality game that's basically a spatial imagining of Missile Command, while Tablecraft just launched on Quest as a free-to-play science playground in which to learn about the periodic table of elements.
Our deep dive discussion with Brochado examined how each idea might evolve, and why we feel each project looks like a nice fit for developer kit support from Apple, Google, and others. We'd like to see these interesting ideas make it into more headsets, and we learned a lot of interesting details about the constraints developers like Brochado face building innovative software for headsets.
Airspace Defender & Tablecraft From Not Suspicious
Tablecraft and Airspace Defender are pretty divergent projects, but as Brochado explained in our discussion each represents a different exploration in the constraints of headsets and their underlying operating systems. In the case of Tablecraft, the game currently requires controllers and cuts you off from other people in the room with full VR. Airspace Defender, meanwhile, uses hand tracking and delivers the entire game in mixed reality views of your physical environment as a diorama-sized world appears in the middle of your play space. That's because Brochado aims to explore how to make a compelling game for limited field of view AR glasses, ahead of Meta shipping developer kits.
With Airspace Defender, we discussed Resolution Games' useful resizing gesture for diorama-sized worlds in Gears & Goo & Demeo, and how such a design change would force them to reconsider how difficulty works in Airspace Defender. We also talked about the extraordinary expense of Apple Vision Pro hardware and how the studio could make use of a developer kit for the game.
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With Tablecraft, we considered how local mirroring on a tablet or other companion device for portions of the game world would make a cool addition for educational use. Brochado revealed they already built some of that functionality for educators to use in some settings, despite developer tools making it exceedingly difficult for them to accomplish.
We encourage you to check out the full video with Brochado embedded above to learn more about the challenges of development, and we'll be following up with Not Suspicious in the months ahead to see how these projects develop.
Animator and Walkabout Mini Golf course designer Henning Koczy offered a tour of Mighty Coconut's Viva Las Elvis chock full of behind-the-scenes details.
The new paid DLC is available for purchase now on all major VR platforms as well as iOS.
Walkabout's 31st course begins at hole 1 as you pull up to the casino in glittering '70s era Las Vegas. Elvis' path ends at hole 18, putting up the piano into Graceland with stops off along the way at the pool, through the Heartbreak Hotel and into The Jungle Room.
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The course is made in collaboration with the rights holders to Elvis Presley's namesake and explores the iconography of "the king" anchored around his presence in a dreamy Las Vegas, as if you've stumbled out of a car into this mirage in the desert held up on struts from the darkness.
The clip from our tour above shows Koczy explaining some of the place-making ideas that anchor Mighty Coconut's regular expansions. Even in this dream-like setting of Viva Las Elvis, details like handrails help ground the player and sell the place, explains Koczy.
I usually record my tours of Walkabout Mini Golf's newest course as a silent camera, putting full focus on one or more of the developers pointing out details as we work our way from hole 1 to 18. For our 25-minute Viva Las Elvis video, though, I recorded my microphone input for a more active Q&A style tour, with Koczy stopping off to pluck guitar strings with me and credit artists developing specific effects, like shiny metal surfaces on casino games and the smoky overhead lights.
The 25-minute path is available here.
If you want to avoid spoilers, check out the tour after you've played through the course yourself. If you've got multitasking up and running you can also play the video in headset as a kind of commentary track.
If you happen to be new to VR in general, you can watch through our full list of tours for a guide to some of the best places you can visit in a headset inside Walkabout Mini Golf. And for those that don't mind spoilers, around the 5-minute mark in our YouTube video is a good spot to drop in and see a really nice detail – the guitar you can strum with your club as you go by.
Walkabout's developers are building up a regular release cadence of about two new courses per season, with the creators also more frequently releasing new props, activities and other tiny details to existing destinations.
Our thanks to Koczy for his time on this tour and for the insights into the challenges of building a place around the iconography of Elvis Presley.
Tours, Membership & Support
We love seeing eye-catching new places in VR and you can always email us with interesting places via tips@uploadvr.com. Our distributed team works around the clock to cover as much as we can. If you enjoy work like this, you can help us do more by becoming a member or patron to support our work directly.
You can also subscribe to us on YouTube, and if you're an active commenter on our articles or our shows, please be understanding of all the new headset owners who might have a difficult time doing certain things or getting certain places in VR. We look forward to answering your questions, engaging in conversation, and finding common ground on complicated subjects, and thanks for stopping by today.
Elin Höhler spent the weekend pulling together a new demo in SideQuest's Banter showing a full speech to 3D generation pipeline making objects in a multiplayer world.
Höhler walked me through the pipeline on Monday, showing the three step generation process – first processing speech to text, then an image from the text, and finally outputting a 3D model directly into the shared multiplayer world space for resizing and placement.
"It's kind of perfect for a zany platform like ours," explained SideQuest founder Shane Harris. "I think our users are gonna enjoy this, decorating their home spaces, using this for making props, I know some of our users have already been using it to generate clothing items that they then put on their custom avatars."
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Our video embedded below goes into slightly more depth explaining the toolset, as recorded on my Quest 3, as Höhler considers newer models in the future producing sharper and better optimized assets, but "playing around with Trellis is like getting your feet wet with what's coming."
The creator example is available if you search "world building" on Banter, available now on Steam and Quest. We've seen other generation tools in platforms like Snap's Spectacles as well as in single player experiences, but this is the first we've tried that has been this successful in a multiplayer VR session.
Gears & Goo is out now on Apple Arcade for Vision Pro and it's a must-play for subscribers and strategy fans. Read on for our full overview.
I spent the better part of two 7-hour train rides over Christmas break locked into Gears & Goo from Resolution Games on Apple Vision Pro. As I reached the later missions, I found myself repeating the same couple of maps for nearly an hour each, steadily improving my performance each time gathering resources, combining powers and fending off the increasingly challenging waves of enemies progressing down multiple paths to my base.
The new strategy game is on Apple Arcade now and a must-play for fans of the tower defense and strategy genres. It's also worth checking out for mixed reality developers who can learn from Resolution's thoughtful use of eye and hand tracking here.
If you don't have a headset, check out the video below to see how I quickly and precisely resize the map to its ideal placement relative to my current position in a chair, just by pinching my middle finger and thumb on each hand and stretching the space between them. The same gesture is present in Demeo, also from Resolution. I'd be curious to use it to position multiple spatial apps next to one another around me using the gesture.
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The map lays out in front of you and relies entirely on Apple Vision Pro's look-and-pinch eye tracking interface for base management, unit construction, pathing and upgrades. Rapidly moving and resizing the map means you can choose whether to physically get up and move around the map or quickly reposition it for easier controls. I've only played the game seated, and found myself repositioning the map occasionally to better eyeball various structures and units. Generally, each character and structure needs to be unobstructed by others for you to select it with your gaze.
Most maps introduce a new gameplay element to consider, building steadily over the course of levels to an onslaught near the end just as you achieve mastery of your arsenal, with voice work that's both cute and funny. The story is about corporate greed and soda, which is about all you need as a backdrop for these bubbly characters spewing cold and hot projectiles at one another. Players earn up to three stars per level by completing certain tasks, like beating the level without losing a structure or within a certain amount of time, so there's some replayability if you want to keep going for all the stars.
Our longer video on YouTube shows the first few levels of the game played against the backdrop of my office wall, after I had played most of the game already. While I breeze through the levels, it's that smooth because Gears & Goo is such a great use of Apple's eye and pinch interface.
While you're not going to find the weapon or map variety as seen in titles like Bloons Tower Defense 6+, which adds a 3D shelf to its minimally modified spatial interface on Vision Pro, you are going to get a much better use of hand and eye tracking here in Gears & Goo.
Resolution Games neither supports multitasking nor fully immersive VR mode for the launch version of Gears & Goo. For the main story, I would have liked to tune out the physical world and go to one of Apple's home environments like the moon. Instead, I played the game against the backdrop of my wall and the back seats of train cars. There's also a mode that lets you place your units on a physical table, but it's not fun and I would have instead preferred to overlay a virtual environment as a backdrop to the main game.
Gears & Goo: More Please
Not as many people are likely to play Gears & Goo on Apple Vision Pro as might Resolution Games' other titles, like Spatial Ops on Quest or even Demeo on any headset, but the title kicks off 2025 showing thoughtful new spatial design for visionOS. Gears & Goo delivers hours of entertainment on Apple Vision Pro with easy-to-use controls, and we hope this work from Resolution grows in the future as I would readily play a sequel or expansion. I'd also be curious to see more done with the middle finger pinch gesture from both Resolution Games and others.
You can find Gears & Goo on Apple Arcade through Apple's App Store.
