10 ms·

VRChat is Laying Off 30% of Team

84 points by tyleo 2y ago

cj 2y ago
Tip for anyone job hunting: ask the company if they’re profitable before accepting the offer. If they are, huge bonus points. If they aren’t, ask them more about how they run their business and how they plan to fund it over time.
- dragontamer 2y ago
  I expect most tech companies to have been profitable in 2021 and 2022, but be struggling today.
  - relyks 2y ago
    It might not be the case. The interest rates in the US were much lower then and companies were able to take on more debt more easily.
    - tadfisher 2y ago
      High interest is good for fintechs.
    - dragontamer 2y ago
      My opinion is nothing to do with interest rates and everything to do with COVID lockdown and (by 2023 and 2024) people getting bored of computers and reducing their spending on computers.
  - AYBABTME 2y ago
    On the contrary, I expect most tech companies to not be profitable especially in ZIRP era, unless they're big and public for many years (or small boutiques). If one is looking to work only at profitable companies, the pool of employer shrinks significantly. You can almost kiss goodbye to the vast majority of VC funded companies. It's not as bad nowadays but in ZIRP times, it's not the norm for growing tech companies to be profitable.
Min0taur 2y ago
The severance package looks decent, but damn, I wouldn't want to be a developer in such a niche market space looking for new work. I wish the best to everyone getting the short end of the stick here.
- gleenn 2y ago
  I would hardly say the platform is dead. Apple just launched the Vision Pro. That's not a silver bullet but I'm sure they are looking for more apps and games. I hardly think VR is going away.
  - Min0taur 2y ago
    Not at all saying it's dead! Just a vastly smaller market space than say, doing crud stuff or ML in the year of our Lord 2024. I'm a huge VR enjoyer and I hope the medium flourishes.
    - Uehreka 2y ago
      I’m pretty sure they’ll be fine. I can’t imagine a CRUD agency being like “VR? No transferable skills! To the breadline with you!” Realtime state management is a highly sought after skill.
- ramesh31 2y ago
  >I wouldn't want to be a developer in such a niche market space looking for new work. VRChat is literally just a Unity game. They'll be fine
haunter 2y ago
VR is just standstill on PC. Steam VR is not dead but not having in any movement at all. In typical Valve fashion their own efforts were one-and-done (Index and HL Alyx). VR is not a gimmick but a niche and relatively expensive hobby sub genre. Like building your own cockpit with controls for Flight Simulator or a racing game. Edit: Deleted the Twitch VR Chat part cause seems like they reverted the policy changes https://x.com/twitchsupport/status/1799589284367696213 https://x.com/twitchsupport/status/1799589284367696213
- corytheboyd 2y ago
  I’ll still respect Valve for clearly CARING so much about what they do, in a world full of garbage people selling out beloved properties for a quick dirty buck. I’m not super hopeful I’ll ever get what would have been the amazing follow up to Alyx (really, episode 2), as yeah, VR didn’t explode. I never expected Alyx in the first place though so… maybe will be surprised in 10 years! I’m super happy for them about the Steam Deck success, this thing is legitimately awesome.
  - haunter 2y ago
    While I like them 1, companies are not our friends 2, they ruined gaming foerever with lootboxes pioneered by TF2 and enabled the whole illegal digital gambling system with CSGO which is going for more than a decade now. They could shut it down but they don’t because they also benefit from it and the ship has now sailed. And it’s a billion dollar unregulated black market. 3, they ruined gaming forever with the whole battlepass system pioneered by Dota 2
    - akr4s1a 2y ago
      Seriously, the pass Valve gets from allowing a gambling empire to piggyback on their API and profit from the lootboxes that fuel it is crazy to me. "Yeah they might have a pseudo-monopoly but their product is good, I think the 30% cut is fine." would be laughed at in most other sectors. They barely even try for their market position, people just rejected competition and scream it's not Steam because "I don't want multiple launchers"
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kstrauser 2y ago
> We took too long to add management. I'm not saying they're wrong. I am saying I've never once seen a situation where adding more managers would improve velocity. I can imagine that such a thing exists and I have nothing whatsoever against the notion of leveling up their leadership. I just haven't personally seen it. > Some different roles and expertise are needed for the next part of our journey. Yes, starting from the CEO. He was the one who built a company structure that wasn't equipped to meet its needs. It's clear their senior leadership isn't as good at their jobs as all those newly unemployed ICs were at theirs.
- WheatMillington 2y ago
  >I'm not saying they're wrong. I am saying I've never once seen a situation where adding more managers would improve velocity. Not everything is about velocity, you also need focus in the right areas.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    Velocity is a vector: it includes a direction component. Management is putatively good at getting everyone to go in the same direction so that the sum of the IC vectors don't cancel out. That wasn't one of the problems in the email, though. The CEO failed to choose that direction, or to recognize that they were lacking one and that they needed to hire someone to help them find it.
- zamadatix 2y ago
  Regarding velocity I echo that I've never run into such a situation either and that it is plausible but odd if really the root problem. Regarding when you chop upper leadership... if a company is run by sitting around waiting to fire someone the instant they do something that causes a loss/underperformance instead of comparing the relative long term expected performance of their options for the role then you're going to fire a lot of amazing employees (of any type) and hire a lot of employees focused on lowering their short term risk instead of maximizing the business's long term growth. A company I work at had to lay off 10% one year despite having the best CEO I've ever run across - things just didn't line up, things fell through, and for the first year we had -10% revenue growth instead of 30+% revenue growth. If they had started with laying off the CEO because of that not only do I think the company would have had a hell of a time in the next 2 years instead of restabilizing its growth I also think myself and a few others would have straight up left as a result. It would have been clear the company had no clue how to properly gauge and set its long term direction by taking such an action in response to the first growth impacting mistakes made by the guy. Now I don't know VRChat as a company and I certainly don't know anything about Graham. Perhaps he's complete shit at the role and really does need to be fired for more than what's covered in this email. What I do know is I strongly disagree with that kind of generalizing logic about how management must need to go the instant employees are let go the same way as I disagree when upper management gets protected long term from or golden parachuted out of solid reasons to get fired. Upper management isn't a magical layer where you must find people that never fail the same as it isn't a magical layer that should be protected from any negative repercussions. It's just another layer of the business where you need to see how you want to place your best bets for the long term performance of the company. The main thing from this email that rubs me a bit in the wrong way from is all of the recent over-hires only get 3 months of severance. This could make everyone finding new things a bit tough given the current VR market and need to branch out into other areas. At the same time, I'd much rather someone hire me for 2 years and then find out they need to get rid of me with some semi decent severance and health coverage than someone be afraid to hire me in the first place because some risk model said something like it's a 50/50 what will happen. By taking a job I'm not expecting you are betting your position on me still being there 2-3 years later, just don't be a dick and fire me a few months after hiring me because you wanted to keep the layoffs a secret or some other poor reasoning.
zmmmmm 2y ago
It sounds like they are a lot bigger than I would have expected. This isn't an email you write to 5 people. Perhaps that is a sign of the problem. I worry that VRChat has worked its way into a local optimum that may be hard to get out of. They've appealed very strongly to niches - people with alternative lifestyles who enjoy the freedom to express themselves in unique and interesting ways. I think it's wonderful but it actively inhibits me from wanting to use VRChat because I don't identify with that. So how do they grow to 10x their current user base without alienating their existing loyal users? This is going to be a classic business dilemma for them I think.
- anonylizard 2y ago
  AI allows people to 'express themselves in unique and interesting ways' far more than VR does. Text and image generation allow people to create worlds completely tailored to themselves, this time unlimited by the need for other people to play along. So AI competes with VR both for users (The type willing to pay for cutting edge consumer tech experiences) and investment (AI is the big thing, VR is so 2022), and labour (How many researchers want to work in VR over AI?)
  - dotnet00 2y ago
    The social aspect of vrchat is what makes it popular. None of what you described has any relevance to that. Fittingly, the equivalent projects started by the companies currently trying to stuff generative AI into everything fell completely flat. People don't care about having AI generate exactly the world they want. People want the "wild"-ness and spontaneity that VRChat offers (finding a cool world someone made, running into real, interesting, people and hanging out with them). The issue being that as VRC grows/grew, they had to start taming that wildness (because it also allows for a lot of things not really compatible with monetization), but that slowly brings them closer to the over-sanitization problem that killed all the competitors.
    - lmm 2y ago
      > The social aspect of vrchat is what makes it popular. None of what you described has any relevance to that. I bet chatting with Replika or Character AI is satisfying the same needs as VRChat for many of the people that either appeals to. I think that's what they were getting at.
freemanon 2y ago
Had they gone the route of open development, modder would have, and had been, developing a lot of functionality for the platform for free. Instead, they slapped Easy Anti-Cheat and killed the modding community. Close walled platforms will always wither sooner or later. They had massive potential back in 2021, when VRChat felt like the start of a new internet. Instead of letting the communities flourish, they were tempted by VCs and their unsustainable business model.
- WheatMillington 2y ago
  >Close walled platforms will always wither sooner or later. There are just so, so many cases where this hasn't happened, and where walled gardens have thrived. And also many examples to the contrary, in which open platforms have failed.
usernamed7 2y ago
I appreciate the candid letter, but honestly this sounds like a bad leader. Not an evil one, just a bad one. The lack of strategy, and lack of alignment, and praising what management brings... this is someone that is asleep at the wheel. I can't imagine a company that's been flat for 10 years is going to welcome management with open arms. While they've given themselves more runway, hard to see them not get sold off or close up in the future.
- mvkel 2y ago
  This is the typical course. An expert in a specific niche builds something, and against all odds, it takes off! But now they need to jump into the pit of commerce and figure out how to be a business person; a much different skill. Sometimes they can make the leap, most of the time they don't. The most self-aware bring in an outside ceo before the growth curve plateaus
- erikpukinskis 2y ago
  Maybe. But they do reference “product” alongside “management”… If you just have a bunch of engineering a design ICs “doing stuff” and no one is doing any form of project management (making sure you’re building things you can afford that customers will pay for) or product management (making sure they team is building what they said they would), that is, in fact, a recipe for disaster. And saying “we hired some product people and project managers and we think that will correct our course” is not a bad hypothesis IMO.
xyst 2y ago
VR sort of died out at the same time as “Metaverse” and NFTs/web3 did. Tech is way out of reach for regular consumers. It’s clunky. UX for games and applications is difficult to use. The locked in ecosystems with various devices doesn’t help as well (Apple vs Facebook/Occulus).
- TulliusCicero 2y ago
  Clunky I'll give you. VR hardware and software still has a lot of maturing to do. "Out of reach" isn't true though, if we're talking about developed nations. An Oculus Quest is similarly priced to a game console.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  could also be that there's a ceiling to the number of people who find living inside the matrix desirable, ask Second Life
- bitsandboots 2y ago
  I hope it isn't dying. The basic tech is no longer out of reach, and closed ecosystems aren't make or break, but there are other issues. 1) marketing vr for games and productivity is a waste. in those roles its just a novelty, and the limitations irritate enough to make use short-lived. the focus should be on social and media. it's a bigger market and the value proposition is more obvious. there's a few video players, but other than vrchat i can't think of anyone pushing the boundaries on social use. 2) the desired hardware isn't really here yet, and too few want to invest in that eventual payoff Most of the headsets have the same old strap mechanism, lens limitations, and almost no integration of body tracking past your hands and head. Tue quest pro is expensive, but its form factor and tracking integration is novel and convenient. I hope to see more such innovation. 3) tracking and movement convenience and time-to-content needs improvement Carmack has said it all before. You can't get VR to the masses if it requires too much voodoo to operate. A quest 2 isnt hard to use, but it isn't the desired hardware either. Full body tracking is currently limited to just nerds because they're the only ones who will put up with the requirements and limitations, yet, you need that for good social interaction. Hand tracking needs to be better. You need to be able to walk around freely. And omni-directional treadmills will never get adoption if they even ever get properly made.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
oraphalous 2y ago
There is one thing I wanted out of VR... TO BE TRANSPORTED... That's what all the initial hype was about. You go in VR, and you supposedly get this feeling of presence that blows your mind. Instead the whole thing seems to have gone in the direction of lofi social stuff - which only the relentlessly computer bound will ever desire. I don't get the argument at all that this is THE mainstream path to mass adoption. Who thinks that if they really succeed in siphoning off a significant portion of REAL world interaction into this simulated lofi hell that this is going to be a great way to live? I mean really. There is only one VR experience that really blew me away. It was a free demo of Deckard's apartment in blade runner. You could go out on the balcony and see the city with a flying cop car going past on a loop. Vangelis playing in the background... It was breathtaking. I setup my area so I could sit on my couch, on this balcony, with a glass of whiskey in reach, watching that cop car fly past for ages. Rights holders made the demo maker take it down.
bitsandboots 2y ago
Not surprised but still concerned that eventually the good times will be over. vrchat right now feels like a place not yet touched by eternal summer (or the modern equivalents of... eternal bots, ads and ai?), full of real people, diversity of experiences, and talent. It's also a wild place to see the most obscure hardware of vr in use such as face tracking and haptic suits. And some people even have adult peripheral integration. For me it's my motivation to learn 3d art. Don't think I'd continue if I didn't have a place to share it. I don't want the inevitable enshitification, but there's no way it will be a free ride forever. EAC was already a blow to the community. I just hope it retains some charm when it reaches some stable state of monetization. And I hope it inspires more VR-as-a-social-tool programs, since I think games are far more of a novelty in VR than being able to meet people at events without leaving my house. It seems like a natural evolution of meeting people over chatrooms.

84 points by tyleo 2y ago

cj 2y ago

Tip for anyone job hunting: ask the company if they’re profitable before accepting the offer. If they are, huge bonus points. If they aren’t, ask them more about how they run their business and how they plan to fund it over time.

dragontamer 2y ago
I expect most tech companies to have been profitable in 2021 and 2022, but be struggling today.
- relyks 2y ago
  It might not be the case. The interest rates in the US were much lower then and companies were able to take on more debt more easily.
  - tadfisher 2y ago
    High interest is good for fintechs.
  - dragontamer 2y ago
    My opinion is nothing to do with interest rates and everything to do with COVID lockdown and (by 2023 and 2024) people getting bored of computers and reducing their spending on computers.
- AYBABTME 2y ago
  On the contrary, I expect most tech companies to not be profitable especially in ZIRP era, unless they're big and public for many years (or small boutiques). If one is looking to work only at profitable companies, the pool of employer shrinks significantly. You can almost kiss goodbye to the vast majority of VC funded companies. It's not as bad nowadays but in ZIRP times, it's not the norm for growing tech companies to be profitable.

Min0taur 2y ago

The severance package looks decent, but damn, I wouldn't want to be a developer in such a niche market space looking for new work. I wish the best to everyone getting the short end of the stick here.

gleenn 2y ago
I would hardly say the platform is dead. Apple just launched the Vision Pro. That's not a silver bullet but I'm sure they are looking for more apps and games. I hardly think VR is going away.
- Min0taur 2y ago
  Not at all saying it's dead! Just a vastly smaller market space than say, doing crud stuff or ML in the year of our Lord 2024. I'm a huge VR enjoyer and I hope the medium flourishes.
  - Uehreka 2y ago
    I’m pretty sure they’ll be fine. I can’t imagine a CRUD agency being like “VR? No transferable skills! To the breadline with you!” Realtime state management is a highly sought after skill.
ramesh31 2y ago
>I wouldn't want to be a developer in such a niche market space looking for new work. VRChat is literally just a Unity game. They'll be fine

haunter 2y ago

VR is just standstill on PC. Steam VR is not dead but not having in any movement at all. In typical Valve fashion their own efforts were one-and-done (Index and HL Alyx). VR is not a gimmick but a niche and relatively expensive hobby sub genre. Like building your own cockpit with controls for Flight Simulator or a racing game. Edit: Deleted the Twitch VR Chat part cause seems like they reverted the policy changes https://x.com/twitchsupport/status/1799589284367696213 https://x.com/twitchsupport/status/1799589284367696213

corytheboyd 2y ago
I’ll still respect Valve for clearly CARING so much about what they do, in a world full of garbage people selling out beloved properties for a quick dirty buck. I’m not super hopeful I’ll ever get what would have been the amazing follow up to Alyx (really, episode 2), as yeah, VR didn’t explode. I never expected Alyx in the first place though so… maybe will be surprised in 10 years! I’m super happy for them about the Steam Deck success, this thing is legitimately awesome.
- haunter 2y ago
  While I like them 1, companies are not our friends 2, they ruined gaming foerever with lootboxes pioneered by TF2 and enabled the whole illegal digital gambling system with CSGO which is going for more than a decade now. They could shut it down but they don’t because they also benefit from it and the ship has now sailed. And it’s a billion dollar unregulated black market. 3, they ruined gaming forever with the whole battlepass system pioneered by Dota 2
  - akr4s1a 2y ago
    Seriously, the pass Valve gets from allowing a gambling empire to piggyback on their API and profit from the lootboxes that fuel it is crazy to me. "Yeah they might have a pseudo-monopoly but their product is good, I think the 30% cut is fine." would be laughed at in most other sectors. They barely even try for their market position, people just rejected competition and scream it's not Steam because "I don't want multiple launchers"

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kstrauser 2y ago

> We took too long to add management. I'm not saying they're wrong. I am saying I've never once seen a situation where adding more managers would improve velocity. I can imagine that such a thing exists and I have nothing whatsoever against the notion of leveling up their leadership. I just haven't personally seen it. > Some different roles and expertise are needed for the next part of our journey. Yes, starting from the CEO. He was the one who built a company structure that wasn't equipped to meet its needs. It's clear their senior leadership isn't as good at their jobs as all those newly unemployed ICs were at theirs.

WheatMillington 2y ago
>I'm not saying they're wrong. I am saying I've never once seen a situation where adding more managers would improve velocity. Not everything is about velocity, you also need focus in the right areas.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Velocity is a vector: it includes a direction component. Management is putatively good at getting everyone to go in the same direction so that the sum of the IC vectors don't cancel out. That wasn't one of the problems in the email, though. The CEO failed to choose that direction, or to recognize that they were lacking one and that they needed to hire someone to help them find it.
zamadatix 2y ago
Regarding velocity I echo that I've never run into such a situation either and that it is plausible but odd if really the root problem. Regarding when you chop upper leadership... if a company is run by sitting around waiting to fire someone the instant they do something that causes a loss/underperformance instead of comparing the relative long term expected performance of their options for the role then you're going to fire a lot of amazing employees (of any type) and hire a lot of employees focused on lowering their short term risk instead of maximizing the business's long term growth. A company I work at had to lay off 10% one year despite having the best CEO I've ever run across - things just didn't line up, things fell through, and for the first year we had -10% revenue growth instead of 30+% revenue growth. If they had started with laying off the CEO because of that not only do I think the company would have had a hell of a time in the next 2 years instead of restabilizing its growth I also think myself and a few others would have straight up left as a result. It would have been clear the company had no clue how to properly gauge and set its long term direction by taking such an action in response to the first growth impacting mistakes made by the guy. Now I don't know VRChat as a company and I certainly don't know anything about Graham. Perhaps he's complete shit at the role and really does need to be fired for more than what's covered in this email. What I do know is I strongly disagree with that kind of generalizing logic about how management must need to go the instant employees are let go the same way as I disagree when upper management gets protected long term from or golden parachuted out of solid reasons to get fired. Upper management isn't a magical layer where you must find people that never fail the same as it isn't a magical layer that should be protected from any negative repercussions. It's just another layer of the business where you need to see how you want to place your best bets for the long term performance of the company. The main thing from this email that rubs me a bit in the wrong way from is all of the recent over-hires only get 3 months of severance. This could make everyone finding new things a bit tough given the current VR market and need to branch out into other areas. At the same time, I'd much rather someone hire me for 2 years and then find out they need to get rid of me with some semi decent severance and health coverage than someone be afraid to hire me in the first place because some risk model said something like it's a 50/50 what will happen. By taking a job I'm not expecting you are betting your position on me still being there 2-3 years later, just don't be a dick and fire me a few months after hiring me because you wanted to keep the layoffs a secret or some other poor reasoning.

zmmmmm 2y ago

It sounds like they are a lot bigger than I would have expected. This isn't an email you write to 5 people. Perhaps that is a sign of the problem. I worry that VRChat has worked its way into a local optimum that may be hard to get out of. They've appealed very strongly to niches - people with alternative lifestyles who enjoy the freedom to express themselves in unique and interesting ways. I think it's wonderful but it actively inhibits me from wanting to use VRChat because I don't identify with that. So how do they grow to 10x their current user base without alienating their existing loyal users? This is going to be a classic business dilemma for them I think.

anonylizard 2y ago
AI allows people to 'express themselves in unique and interesting ways' far more than VR does. Text and image generation allow people to create worlds completely tailored to themselves, this time unlimited by the need for other people to play along. So AI competes with VR both for users (The type willing to pay for cutting edge consumer tech experiences) and investment (AI is the big thing, VR is so 2022), and labour (How many researchers want to work in VR over AI?)
- dotnet00 2y ago
  The social aspect of vrchat is what makes it popular. None of what you described has any relevance to that. Fittingly, the equivalent projects started by the companies currently trying to stuff generative AI into everything fell completely flat. People don't care about having AI generate exactly the world they want. People want the "wild"-ness and spontaneity that VRChat offers (finding a cool world someone made, running into real, interesting, people and hanging out with them). The issue being that as VRC grows/grew, they had to start taming that wildness (because it also allows for a lot of things not really compatible with monetization), but that slowly brings them closer to the over-sanitization problem that killed all the competitors.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > The social aspect of vrchat is what makes it popular. None of what you described has any relevance to that. I bet chatting with Replika or Character AI is satisfying the same needs as VRChat for many of the people that either appeals to. I think that's what they were getting at.

freemanon 2y ago

Had they gone the route of open development, modder would have, and had been, developing a lot of functionality for the platform for free. Instead, they slapped Easy Anti-Cheat and killed the modding community. Close walled platforms will always wither sooner or later. They had massive potential back in 2021, when VRChat felt like the start of a new internet. Instead of letting the communities flourish, they were tempted by VCs and their unsustainable business model.

WheatMillington 2y ago
>Close walled platforms will always wither sooner or later. There are just so, so many cases where this hasn't happened, and where walled gardens have thrived. And also many examples to the contrary, in which open platforms have failed.

usernamed7 2y ago

I appreciate the candid letter, but honestly this sounds like a bad leader. Not an evil one, just a bad one. The lack of strategy, and lack of alignment, and praising what management brings... this is someone that is asleep at the wheel. I can't imagine a company that's been flat for 10 years is going to welcome management with open arms. While they've given themselves more runway, hard to see them not get sold off or close up in the future.

mvkel 2y ago
This is the typical course. An expert in a specific niche builds something, and against all odds, it takes off! But now they need to jump into the pit of commerce and figure out how to be a business person; a much different skill. Sometimes they can make the leap, most of the time they don't. The most self-aware bring in an outside ceo before the growth curve plateaus
erikpukinskis 2y ago
Maybe. But they do reference “product” alongside “management”… If you just have a bunch of engineering a design ICs “doing stuff” and no one is doing any form of project management (making sure you’re building things you can afford that customers will pay for) or product management (making sure they team is building what they said they would), that is, in fact, a recipe for disaster. And saying “we hired some product people and project managers and we think that will correct our course” is not a bad hypothesis IMO.

xyst 2y ago

VR sort of died out at the same time as “Metaverse” and NFTs/web3 did. Tech is way out of reach for regular consumers. It’s clunky. UX for games and applications is difficult to use. The locked in ecosystems with various devices doesn’t help as well (Apple vs Facebook/Occulus).

TulliusCicero 2y ago
Clunky I'll give you. VR hardware and software still has a lot of maturing to do. "Out of reach" isn't true though, if we're talking about developed nations. An Oculus Quest is similarly priced to a game console.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
could also be that there's a ceiling to the number of people who find living inside the matrix desirable, ask Second Life
bitsandboots 2y ago
I hope it isn't dying. The basic tech is no longer out of reach, and closed ecosystems aren't make or break, but there are other issues. 1) marketing vr for games and productivity is a waste. in those roles its just a novelty, and the limitations irritate enough to make use short-lived. the focus should be on social and media. it's a bigger market and the value proposition is more obvious. there's a few video players, but other than vrchat i can't think of anyone pushing the boundaries on social use. 2) the desired hardware isn't really here yet, and too few want to invest in that eventual payoff Most of the headsets have the same old strap mechanism, lens limitations, and almost no integration of body tracking past your hands and head. Tue quest pro is expensive, but its form factor and tracking integration is novel and convenient. I hope to see more such innovation. 3) tracking and movement convenience and time-to-content needs improvement Carmack has said it all before. You can't get VR to the masses if it requires too much voodoo to operate. A quest 2 isnt hard to use, but it isn't the desired hardware either. Full body tracking is currently limited to just nerds because they're the only ones who will put up with the requirements and limitations, yet, you need that for good social interaction. Hand tracking needs to be better. You need to be able to walk around freely. And omni-directional treadmills will never get adoption if they even ever get properly made.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

oraphalous 2y ago

There is one thing I wanted out of VR... TO BE TRANSPORTED... That's what all the initial hype was about. You go in VR, and you supposedly get this feeling of presence that blows your mind. Instead the whole thing seems to have gone in the direction of lofi social stuff - which only the relentlessly computer bound will ever desire. I don't get the argument at all that this is THE mainstream path to mass adoption. Who thinks that if they really succeed in siphoning off a significant portion of REAL world interaction into this simulated lofi hell that this is going to be a great way to live? I mean really. There is only one VR experience that really blew me away. It was a free demo of Deckard's apartment in blade runner. You could go out on the balcony and see the city with a flying cop car going past on a loop. Vangelis playing in the background... It was breathtaking. I setup my area so I could sit on my couch, on this balcony, with a glass of whiskey in reach, watching that cop car fly past for ages. Rights holders made the demo maker take it down.

bitsandboots 2y ago

Not surprised but still concerned that eventually the good times will be over. vrchat right now feels like a place not yet touched by eternal summer (or the modern equivalents of... eternal bots, ads and ai?), full of real people, diversity of experiences, and talent. It's also a wild place to see the most obscure hardware of vr in use such as face tracking and haptic suits. And some people even have adult peripheral integration. For me it's my motivation to learn 3d art. Don't think I'd continue if I didn't have a place to share it. I don't want the inevitable enshitification, but there's no way it will be a free ride forever. EAC was already a blow to the community. I just hope it retains some charm when it reaches some stable state of monetization. And I hope it inspires more VR-as-a-social-tool programs, since I think games are far more of a novelty in VR than being able to meet people at events without leaving my house. It seems like a natural evolution of meeting people over chatrooms.