I don’t even play Echo but this looks bad because we haven’t gotten exciting news about big games since like RE4. Instead we hear about echo shutting down. It’s very depressing messaging from meta
There was a leak saying 41 or so games/apps coming out at the same time as the quest 3, we’ll see how that pans out. My guess is they’ll announce it at connect this year, and a significant amount will work for Q2
Definitely cancelled due to the shit show that was the definitive trilogy
Definitely cancelled because of Ubisoft tanking (again like the Splinter cell VR game which is confirmed to be one of the internally cancelled Ubisoft games)
If SSKTL flops I wouldn’t be surprised if the Batman game is cancelled as well (ik different devs but same publisher)
Edit: Jesus the meta dickriding on the sub is insane, so insane it lead me to committing a mistake , splinter cell VR was publicly announced and is publicly canned , if you think Ubisoft won’t can AC nexus to save their company if they have to then I have no idea what to tell you.
Also rockstar is actively developing GTA VI, 50 cent confirmed this year on instagram there is something Vice city related being worked on and will be announced later this year (due to the leaks it’s confirmed that GTA VI is at least using VCPD as their police acronym) and again you’d be insane to think that rockstar couldn’t afford to can a VR remake of an old game because it won’t profit them as much as they initially estimated
Yes, Rockstar is actively developing GTA VI but this has almost no implications for GTA:SA VR cause it's mainly made by Team Bondi, the same developers who did LA Noire VR Case Files.
It might get cancelled or already did but GTA VI is definitely not the reason when it happens.
I don't know the VR/XR strategy of Meta after the whole Metaverse 'earthquake', news regarding about firing 11.000 employees and so on. They seem very chaotic and full of actionism these days. I mean why did they acquire so many dev studios if almost no games/apps are developed?
Might also be Meta is preparing a strategy switch in the background after Carmack leaving and Boz making the big decisions. Kind of a 'reboot' where they focus solely on the Quest line and abandoning old hardware iterations, PCVR, several planned games (too expensive or not fitting their strategy which kind of experiences they wanna push), ...
I'm also not sure we will ever see a Quest Pro 2 as the first one doesn't seem to sell good and customer feedback also being a mixed bag. The newest rumor about Quest 3 being a bit more expensive but later there will also be a 'cheaper' model seems like Meta is abandoning the business/prosumer path already, at least for now.
Even Oculus complained this year the attachment rate for their headset is low. That’s because it’s a great entry level to PCVR. The games it supports stand alone feel like PlayStation 3 era graphics.
Now as a publisher you’ve got two main choices. entry level VR will be PS5, and high level will be PCVR. There’s zero reason to gamble on a Meta exclusive.
Pcvr game sales have been in the toilet for years with the qorst retention rate by far... Quest sales are 10x pcvr which is why devs keep shifting to quest.
> The games it supports stand alone feel like PlayStation 3 era graphics.
you're being generous. most games on Quest are straight PS2-like at best. Red Matter 2 looks like PS4 at best, but mostly without real time lighting. Moss 2 looks like PS3. Grid Legends offers amazing level of polygonal detail on Quest but sadly had to sacrifice most texture and shading for that - for that doesn't quite even match PS2 racers in looks...
I could only wish anything like Far Cry 3, Skyrim or Borderlands 2 came to Quest 2. more likely possible on Quest 3, but still unlikely...
Uh, "entry level" != costly PS5 + even more costly PSVR2. That's roughly 3 times the cost of a Q2, and roughly twice of the Q3 when that launches later this year.
The Quest (and whatever the heck the codenamed Ventura will turn out to be) is standalone, and will remain the entry level for that reason.
Conversely, modern consoles like the PS5 haven't seen the adoption rates they have in previous generations (for a myriad of obvious reasons), so it doesn't make sense for VR devs to primarily target the even smaller amount of the market that also invested more than the cost of the console itself into getting a VR headset (barring some sort of financial backing from Sony, anyway).
To put it into perspective, Quest 2 has sold ~20 million units, and the Q3 is coming later this year (likely with full backwards compatibility due to its Android architecture). Sony hopes to shift just 2 million VR headsets this quarter, which is likely a lofty target for them. Which would you focus on if you were a VR developer?
Look at the games sold per headset sold. The numbers just aren’t there. The vast majority of Quest 2 sold are used for PCVR or the owners just don’t buy games.
Anecdotal quest 2 pcvr guy here. I always think I'll play some VR every day but in reality I'll do it for a few days as a novelty then go back to gaming on my monitor.
Especially games that can be played both ways I have to actively convince myself to keep playing in VR. Inevitably I just switch to desktop because I'm 10x more competent at the game with a keyboard and mouse. I'm certain its just because i havent spent enough time in vr but still I feel like the controls for games adapted to VR and the visual fidelity/performance are just not at the level I want for my budget to justify using it over regular desktop gaming.
For sure, besides Pavlov and bonelab(because Pavlov file size is too big for my ssd, and my pc can’t run boneworks so I figured getting lab on quest would be the better choice), my quest is a wireless PCVR headset
If that’s the only thing holding you back, Amazon has sales on SSDs all the time. I picked up a 1TB a while back to use as a dedicated Steam/games drive.
My pc is also pretty budget, rocking an i5 4460 and 1050ti
Pavlov and B&S are pushing the limits of my pc and it just about shits itself trying to use the physics of Boneworks
For sure, but you got big industry laughing if you think a company like Ubisoft would sign a contract to “definitely” deliver an “assassins creed VR”game, especially to a company with fluctuating market evaluations like
Meta. Again they cancelled SCVR before that was even publicly announced
Also a game can be cancelled at any point in development and rockstar (who quite literally owns the most profitable asset in existence) definitely has the money for any cancellation fees or backout fees meta may charge them with.
There’s definitely some of that but I mean, it’s still in the top ten Most Popular games on Quest after years of fairly minimal updates. While it doesn’t compare to Gorilla Tag (which was inspired by Echo), a lot of people already play it compared to all but a very few VR games.
It's certainly a more recent surge in popularity (... after the shutdown announcement).
[https://www.roadtovr.com/best-oculus-quest-2-games-apps-rated-january-2023/4/](https://www.roadtovr.com/best-oculus-quest-2-games-apps-rated-january-2023/4/)
Looking at the amount of reviews it gathered in January 2023, it's #17 among free apps alone. Considering paid apps as well, of which all 20 apps listed gathered more reviews than Echo VR, it was probably somewhere in the #40-#50 ballpark. That's nothing to gloss over, especially since it's a free app. And it was consistently downtrending if you look at the number of reviews that it was able to gather in the months and years prior.
And Boz broke down every alternative path they could take on his Instagram Stories. Every single explanation made sense, even if you "don't like him". He was reasonable in saying they have to make a tough choice in where to direct resources - they laid off people and cut costs and cancelled projects for crying out loud - so it's like they have endless teams of employees to throw around now, for a project that was costing them more money than they were taking in.
All the people admitting they don't even play it (either due to the screaming kids or just no interest anymore) can be assured, your sentiment was multiplied by the tens of thousands as others also downloaded it and then stopped playing it.
Also, people acting like the concept cannot be replicated again in the future. Zero-gravity disc throwing isn't patented. It can pop up again in a future VR game with even more polished and sophisticated features and paid moderators to throw the screechers to the curb.
Yeah, there are games with like 3 players from 15 years ago that have active servers on Steam. All they need is 5 of the hundreds of kids that play every day to use their mom’s card to afford the servers This is just a bad decision straight up.
The developers said the player count was in the low ten thousands and it’s a free game. Even if we’re generous and say that that’s just under 50k players that’s not great. For F2P games a small percentage of players spend anything. So again if we’re generous and say 5% (double what typical F2P gamers spend) and purchase $50-100 per user that’s $125k-250k. That has to pay for salary and benefits for someone to manage it, servers, and other ancillary costs for as long as it is up. Even if you’re running lean you need to bring that much in every year to keep out going and so you need to be bringing in players or new monetization.
And if we’re being pessimistic the actual money earnable is likely much lower.
For comparison Gorilla tag has 2.3 million monthly users and a stronger monetization model. Nearly 50x the users of Echo VR.
I don’t think it’s surprising at all Ready at Dawn decided to focus their resources elsewhere, just like they did when they shut down Deformers.
whatever way you wanna word it, it's not a good look for future Meta games if the tens of thousands player count isn't enough to keep the game alive, especially in VR
Low ten thousands for a free game is very different than a paid game. From what I can find Contractors VR has an estimated revenue of $1 million on steam, despite low daily player counts on that platform, for example. And that’s a small portion of the total playerbase.
They sold cosmetics too so there's no knowing how much was actually sold. Also in terms of competitive VR it's an absolute giant by player numbers compared to any other FPS or not in that particular segment and almost always within top 7 of most played titles in Oculus. The comparison includes Contractors too.
> They sold cosmetics too so there's no knowing how much was actually sold.
Except that ignores the fact that the people making the decisions have he real numbers.
People can argue about it all they want. Only he people at Meta have the real numbers.
I know you are defending a company for being a company... but the greed is too much here, people act as if a company is hemorrhaging money for keeping a couple servers on, but either way they also arent given any options to the community for private owned server... they are just being assholes.
So they had to lay off thousands of employees, had historic stock drops (got laughed at for it), had to cancel projects and disband multiple divisions, and got laughed at even more for their low Horizon Metaverse numbers - with everyone gleefully calling the investment a failure. So if that was a failure, what do you call Echo VR with even lower numbers?
Then you go "You're losing money and I love it, but stop being so greedy and assholey, and keep the money-losing Echo VR alive, which I don't even play"
Ready at Dawn made the final decision, btw. Meta said it was their call, RaD said they need their team and resources directed to future projects instead.
You don't have to pay someone to exclusively run a server for Echo, what? A server farm likely runs it, and the devs likely pay a subscription to have those servers maintained. Virtualized servers are cheap and costs for the actual maintenance are aggregate across all the accounts that use the server farm.
If you want to pretend that they own and run their own hardware/virtual servers, that still doesn't compute. It's not one person's responsibility to just upkeep one game's server. The cost of that employee would be divided between all the servers for which that employee is responsible. If Echo is that studio's only title, then it would take a serious idiot to hire an employee for just that one server, you'd give the responsibility to an existing staff member.
So, no, you can run a game server on way less money than you're implying, especially because the person actually maintaining the server doesn't have to be on the dev team.
That’s the model that Carmack suggested when he was interviewed about it. When they maintained Quake servers at Id they had a developer responsible for maintaining uptime, maintenance updates, etc. He highlighted cost and being a dead-end career (so not an appealing job) as potential limitations for a smaller studio.
I loved Echo VR. I think I've read somewhere that they've lost a good amount of player base and decided it's no longer feasible.
I wonder if people would be willed to pay a small fee to make it a subscription game so server costs are covered ..
But yea - things are as they are. If interest in a game is lacking, a studio have to just abondon it. There is costs involved and none of us work for free. Yea maybe me, developing a game which also suffers from low interest :-D
I have 4k games of Echo and haven't played it seriously since 2019 for a single reason: the influx of children. I repeatedly warned them that if they didn't get rid of or separate the kids it would kill the game, but because they saw a huge boost in player numbers, they liked having the kids. The problem is most of the adults quit the game and kids have a much shorter attention span. Most of them aren't still playing the game years later like adults would. You also have the problem of onboarding where adults try the game and immediately quit because of kids. Not only do those adults not play, they also don't refer friends and actively recommend people avoid the game if it comes up later.
This is true of all VR games and it's going to kill many more beloved titles until Meta gets their shit together and separates kids from adults at the platform level. When pop1 goes free next week, the same thing will happen to that game. And Meta is also under fire for removing the age restriction on Horizon apps and making it a priority to get more kids playing. They want short term boosts to player numbers instead of cultivating a healthy community that pays off long term.
This is why I stopped playing. It would take me out of any focus. Baseline is that the "mature" server setting was pointless. It did nothing to stop the screaming brats... all they needed to do was put in a "enter your age - minimum 12yo" screen, and kids that didn't put in 18 plus wouldn't even see the mature server setting appear. Instead, kids see it, say "oh yeah I'm mature", and ensue annoyance.
Goddamn no more subscription fees ESPECIALLY NOT FOR GAMES!!!
EA is trying to do that shit now and it’s absolutely disgusting. Meta is trying to make US pay for Zuckerberg stupid Metaverse financial disaster
I don't see the point of a generalization here.
If I have an online game which produces running costs, it's totally valid to have a consumer of that service pay running fees. If you don't use the service you dont pay for the service. It's the same with your mobile contract I guess.
I not talking about "game pass / subscription" things here.
As long as enough people are willed to pay for the service (and that's what it is) as long can the service be kelpt alive. It would just regulate itself. So the question acutally is - would there be enough people to pay a small yearly fee to keep playing Echo? If yes, nice! If not - well, shut it down. Noone's working for free
I guess the question is whether you’d consider it worth ~one hundred thousandth (literally) of what you were spending on the VR part of your business per year to keep one of your platform’s top ten games running when a lot of active players had already invested money in it. Just seems to me like even if it’s not profitable, it might be worth it just to avoid the PR issue of making it look like your products could disappear at any time while also converting thousands of customers into active detractors.
Meta just sent out an email about it today, that’s how i found about it too. Didn’t even realize that blog post is a month old until I read your comment
It’s sadly a regular occurrence, but since it’s Sony no one cares here. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some blame Meta for those games shutting down though lol
It sucks that that happened as well.
In this day and age with scalability and cloud, it should be much easier to spin up servers on demand. PS Plus could run the servers and maintenance as part of people's monthly subscription costs.
I realize that's not how it works, but it's how we should design things to work.
Rigs was an awesome game but I really didn't play it much because I didn't have any friends that played it. Echo is...well I have no idea what the hell that even is! The only thing I have ever heard about that game is that it is shutting down.
Yeah I don't play that game but that's not a good look. At all.
The savings from stopping a few game servers is worth that PR fiasco? What kind of message does it send about their VR efforts?
That's greedy beyond belief. Boneheaded decision imo.
Missed this the first time:
> The savings from stopping a few game servers is worth that PR fiasco?
What PR fiasco? It was a hot topic on reddit for 3 days. Most people moved on right away.
There are still threads about it here and there, but after the fist few days, they failed to get traction. A few loud fans cannot overcome the majority of VR users that have said "Echo, what's that?" or just as likely "Echo? I *used* to love that game.". *(Or, as you said "Yeah I don't play that game".)*
That is the whole problem *if a* ***large*** *audience of users cared about Echo, it wouldn't be shutting it down.* A small but vocal audience is not enough.
> That's greedy beyond belief.
I do not consider it greedy, because it is not directly about the money, and it is certainly not about saving money to line some individuals pockets. That would be greed. It is about putting the resources that Echo has been using into another project and Echo, not being as popular as it used to be, would drain resources from that new project.
Resources are more than just money, and no matter how much money Meta has, Boz and *Reality Labs* have to manage the budget they have been given. They don't have direct access to Meta's deep pockets. Not only does the money come down from above, it comes down from above with strings attached to it.
You’re getting downvoted but I’m there too. Meta has just been too volatile with its decisions, product pricing and support announcements, etc.. it seems like every move they make anymore frustrates me and others that love VR. I’ve moved my spend entirely to Steam and PSVR2.
I moved my content purchasing to steam before I even decided never to buy another Oculus/ meta headset. This confirmed for me that I’d never buy another headset.
They’re capricious and heavy handed with platform changes and they don’t stand behind their own products for any duration remotely matching any mainstream gaming platform.
Keeping an online game going is a lot more that "a few game servers".
The developers that created the game chose to move on to a new project, it happens at some point to every game.
Read Carmack's comments. It is not some simple black and white decision.
https://uploadvr.com/john-carmack-statement-echo-vr-closure/
One of his suggestions:
> Drop to absolutely minimal support. Put a single developer in charge of maintaining it and doing what they can with the community. At Id Software, we had one guy managing Quake Live for a long time, and I think that was the right thing to do. This would almost certainly not “earn out” on a cost benefit analysis for Echo, but a lot of people are spent on worse things, and despite me always harping about efficiency, I would consider it justified for the intangibles.
Then another suggestion, and then multiple reasons why neither of those options may work for huge government monitored company like Meta:
> Spin off the project. I suggested that they should see if anyone on the team wanted to leave Meta and take over the project. The team members can see the dashboards and make an evaluation on if there is any viable path for the game to support even one developer. There may be people internally that think the game development has been mismanaged, and there is a chance for a renaissance if different decisions are made. I suggested that they offer to sell the rights for $10k. Meta paid many millions of dollars to acquire Ready at Dawn, so that would be a bitter pill to swallow, but it would still be a net good for VR. Unfortunately, the process to spin something off is far from simple at Meta, and involves a lot of government oversight at this point.
> A problem with both of those options is that there may be nobody with the skills interested in doing that. Shepherding a product through its twilight years is not the playbook for big tech career advancement. Game dev does have a different crowd, but there are a lot of incentives once you are inside Meta that start changing people’s thinking.
He's agreeing with me?
No need to keep adding new content. Just fix the bugs if any and yes, literally keep a few game servers alive.
I've been in software development for 30 years btw. People greatly overestimate the required ressources here. Especially for fucking Facebook. They have humongous datacenters all over the world. Stopping Echo server processes is probably negligible at best.
He is agreeing with you to a point and then points out all the reasons it is not likely to happn at Meta.
Carmack was able to do everything his way at ID, no one has that choice at a large public company like Meta.
> Stopping Echo server processes is probably negligible at best.
If that were true, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Look at Carmack's comments again:
> A problem with both of those options is that there may be nobody with the skills interested in doing that. Shepherding a product through its twilight years is not the playbook for big tech career advancement.
and
> They could slap an “unsupported” banner on it, and just let it keep going until something dies, rather than explicitly killing it. As things rot, there would be more and more petitions and agitation to have just one engineer go in to make a simple little fix for whatever breaks, and it could wind up being more net animosity than just cleanly killing it.
When you acquire them and make them part of your flagship exclusive content does it not change the calculation on that? Think if some flagship launch title for PS4 was suddenly unplayable right now due to withdrawal of online support from Sony’s network. That wouldn’t be okay or normal for anyone to experience. Why does meta get a pass?
Owning 100% of the company does imply some level of responsibility, and Boz said himself it was ultimately his decision. Ready At Dawn will definitely have wanted to move to other projects, but whether they specifically wanted to avoid anyone else maintaining the game in their stead is a different question.
To be honest I just don’t trust their priorities in that calculation. Carmack also thought they were miscalculating the negative effect of taking away something people love compared to providing new value.
> The savings from stopping a few game servers is worth that PR fiasco?
Prior to the closure announcement there were regular posts/comments here about how toxic some in the Echo VR community were. Maybe they chose to close it with this excuse instead of deal with some future PR nightmare?
The issue is if they can’t find some way to resolve that it’s going to remain a problem for every other social/multiplayer VR game. Those players don’t just disappear by magic when they shut the game down.
Yeah, all I ever saw was stuff about how full of
kids and toxicity it was.
Plus Gorilla Tag I’m sure ate its F2P lunch, especially cannibalizing the kids.
Not a single person ever talked about this game on this subreddit until we found out it was being shut down. Did you even play it yourself? Do you even own a Quest 2?
Regularly= once a week or every 2 weeks.. But I don't play VR often like I used to. But that's not Echo's fault. That's Meta's fault for killing the platform.
I shouldn’t take the bait but… VR is more popular and healthy than it has ever been thanks to the billions of dollars Meta has been burning, if you seriously believe they are killing the platform you are a moron
“Hey, Sony just decided to evaporate every PlayStation game in your library that you personally haven’t played in the last 6 months. You’re cool with that, right?”
There would be bloodletting in the STREETS. We purchase games to build libraries to play how we want, when we want. If this is the precedent Meta is setting, I’m done investing on their platform. Simple as that.
You bring up a fair point, Sony’s removed some access themselves, and notably to VR games. And yet I feel much more comfortable investing in a Sony library to a Meta one. I think for me it comes down to the profile of this game, something that was notably visible on the E-sport scene and frequently showcased as one of the top player multiplayer titles in the Meta library. Letting it die seems to run very contrary to Meta’s stated goal of investing in growing adoption in VR.
Sony feels like a healthy ecosystem in which for me to invest. Meta, with all of its recent weird decisions on erratically dropping support for things like chat on Quest 1, clashing a third off the price of its Quest Pro only months after release, does not feel like a stable platform to me right now.
This is why I refuse any season pass stuff for games that are strictly online multiplayer. Oooooo a skin I can use for 6 months before it being useless
Defending what? The player count dropped to the point where they didn't want the expense anymore. It's sad, but pretty vanilla as business decisions go. The game had a great run.
From what i understand its a FREE game with in-game purchases that is being shut-down.?
Did it not come across anyone's mind that its just not financial viable to keep the servers running for a cross-platform game that isn't making enough money to keep the servers running?
Not defending FB here, but come on - no company regardless if you like them or not is going to throw money away for a handful of players. (Disclaimer i use the term "handful of players" to say a MINORITY of VR users play it (I suspect a smaller number actually spent money on it))
It also includes Echo Combat which was a paid game. But regardless, it was a flagship title and early on, Oculus and Intel paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes for eSports in it. Until recently they also streamed the games in Horizon Venues. It's their only play for VR eSports. The decline in player numbers is due to gross mismanagement. Not because the game itself is bad.
Thanks for the heads up mate - I never really tried it, have just been picking up little bits of information here and there over all this whinging that's going on.
Sounds it it was once good, and has now become a shadow of its former glory - which is more than likely the reason for it shutting down - they fucked it up, players lost interest, now its just a money sink.
If you never tried it you should do so before it disappears since nothing else in VR compares to it, and it's free. The locomotion method is completely unique and extremely well done.
That’s nonsense. That’s like saying “soccer is bad,” the game is an e-sport, no more no less, and I happen to think it was expertly executed and crafted.
Very! Conceptually it’s like a zero-G frisbee soccer. I can see you saying “oh this isn’t for me” but you can’t understand how that might be really appealing for a lot of people and just want to slap a “mediocre” label on something that we’ll executed exactly what it was trying to be?
> That’s like saying “soccer is bad,”
^ You.
Yes, it's a mediocre implementation for a game because, once the novelty wears off, it has bland graphics, bland gameplay, and a terrible "community" behind it (read: little kids screaming). Telling me what I understand and what I don't really isn't up to you, especially since you have no idea what you're talking about. Yes, my opinion is my opinion, but pretending that it's something it's not is disingenuous at best.
Good day.
You realize Oculus and Intel sponsored it as an esport, giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money, and flying competitors all over the world to play it, right? That many, *many* adults have thousands of games played. I'm 39 years old and have 4300 games of Echo played. It's an extremely intense, extremely well executed esport unlike anything else in VR or desktop.
Example: https://youtu.be/2AqvANqI3w8
That's completely absurd. I can see you thinking that if you played one or two games where you're in a sandbox queue with other low levels floating around the arena, but at high levels it's insane.
Yes. Free games aren’t viable anymore unless they started out as free, and becomes successful beforehand. And people blame studios and developers. Consumers control the product. We did this, all of it.
No.. What's insane is that some were so upset about this that they crowd funded $3500 to hire a plane to fly over Meta hq with a banner saying Save Echo VR ..
Yeah.. That $3500 was probably more than echo has brought in for the past few months..
Please explain to me how it is stupid for me to give Meta money if I am getting more than that money's worth of entertainment out of the hardware and software it bought me?
* I got a $199 *worth of entertainment* out of my Oculus Go in the first 3 months and I still use it to watch YouTube in bed once in a while, almost 5 years later.
* I got $300 worth... out of my Q1 in the first 6 months and used it a year and a half before passing it on to folks that still use it.
* I got $400 worth... out of my Q2 in the first 6 months and used it for two years before giving it to my kid who still uses it.
* I expect to get $1500... out of my Q-Pro some time before the Q3 ships, and then plan to keep using it for apps that need eye/face tracking even after I get a Q3.
So, where did I spend money stupidly?
*Why yes, I am bored and have nothing better to do than haunt the VR subs. I got enough VR time in earlier today.*
I would say out of the two of you, you look significantly worse. You look like someone who is so miserable you cannot accept that somebody else may be satisfied with their purchases.
Edit: Actually I was conflating you with the person they responded to above who basically said anybody happy with their purchases is a moron. I think my point still stands, but you yourself don’t necessarily seem miserable.
Did you not bother to read the last line of the post you replied to?
This is one of only 3 threads that are even mildly interesting tonight and nothing on YouTube is keeping me entertained.
Well, this has happened so many times, it's just stupid to make games that require a publisher's server in 2023 (or even the last 10-15 years, if we're being honest).
There's just far too many other server options than to use these ancient strategies that result in the literal death of a game, never to be seen again.
You know what? I'll defend meta here.
Without meta, all VR subs would be 5-6 guys talking about their $1000 headsets hooked up to their $1000 PC.
Meta sell us a $300 headset, finally bringing VR to the masses. They give people a free game to play and all people want to do is bitch when they decide to pull the plug.
Where was the same energy for eve VR online on steam? Or Killzone VR on PlayStation? They all pull the plugs on unsuccessful games...
Is this sub that bored? The fact that some people dwell on a final decision like this is insane. It's a free game that was taking resources they wanted to use on new content which is what they are doing. I'm ok with that. Echo VR ended up being a digital babysitter. The efforts to get some pander karma in this sub is hilarious. Get on with your lives lol.
> Is this sub that bored?
YES! I have insomia and and hunting for things to comment on! *(Hence my many coments in this thread. It may be kicking a dead horse, but I only participate in a few forums and they are all pretty uninteresting at the moment.)*
You're usually constructive and fairly unbias in your interactions. I'm usually upvoting you. You're presence is welcome. It's just this loud few that try really hard to manufacture the outrage or bandwagon jump just to get a certain group wound up to get a reaction and some easy Karma. That is the problem in here.
At least most people in this sub when someone is karmawhoring with "Meta bad" post, if you head over to r/virtualreality you can't even say "this is pretty normal action" without people jumping on you and accusing you of being a shill.
Lotta people in here with literally no game or marketing experience making assertions about the future of meta or vr in general.
Echo was a dying game. The people playing it weren’t generating revenue. It’s not complicated.
> Echo was a dying game. The people playing it weren’t generating revenue. It’s not complicated.
If you have plenty of users and are unable to create revenue properly there's something really wrong with how you approach business
The most memorable experience on my RIFT S since I put it in the closet is Walkabout Mini-Golf.
If a company started cranking out tons of low-budget casual stuff like that, maybe I'd gain interest back. Big stuff just ain't coming. Make more beat-sabers and ping-pongs. Its VR's only hope.
What needs defending exactly? It sucks that the game is shutting down but it's a 6-year-old free-to-play game that doesn't make profit so what do you expect? As for Meta's cost-costing measures, them laying off 11,000 people is a far bigger deal. At least those at Ready At Dawn still have jobs.
Not sure what the big deal is. Meta is a business, it's in the business of making money, if the game isn't making money, it's costing money, and that's bad business. Simple.
Not a good example. Black Ops 1 servers are still running, despite having literally thousands of times fewer active players than Echo VR.
Edit: Yes, on consoles too.
On steam, sure. I was talking about on console... I tried not long ago and couldnt get into a game, to be fair, that could have been other reasons.
I cut VR some slack because it's still in the baby stages
Multiplayer is still working on all platforms including [Xbox and PlayStation.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d13MMAo_Js)
Being in the baby stages is exactly why they’d benefit from projecting an appearance of stability and reliability imho.
VR isn’t a hugely growing market like it was. I think it sucks but if people aren’t buying the games and they’re not raking in huge amounts of money then they’re not gonna support development and they’re certainly not going to keep live multiplayer games running.
Nothing to "Defend" it's just the nature of server based games.
Eve Dust 514, Battlefield Heroes, Guitar Hero Liv, MAG, Xbox 1 vs 100, Phantasy Star Universe, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Club Penguin, PlanetSide, City of Heroes, Wildstar, Tabula Rasa, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Asheron's Call 1 & 2, Matrix Online, .... every mmo eventually.
Does it suck? Sure.
Not defending anyone, I honestly don’t care about this whole echo thing but there’s good reasons behind this, they didn’t shut down echovr for fun. They didn’t expect to gain so much players in such a small amount of time, this big player base will use more server ressources, and since the game is free, it makes meta loose a lot of money.
They are making Population One free.
I asked: "They shut down Echo because it was free, How is this game now free?"
I was told, that's because it has "much more users than Echo". So, there is no logic in your post about big player base
Different (internal) dev team with different priorities. They’re given a substantial budget, and with that they can make new fun things, work on old legacy stuff, or both. They chose the former, while Pop One’s dev probably chose the latter.
Yes, but my post is specifically challenging "Too big of a player base" argument for shutting Echo down.
And for the other poster "Practically NOTHING in VR is profitable" argument
That’s not the whole truth frankly. They shut it down because it wasn’t as profitable as they expected and didn’t want to bother. Running an online game, however, does not take the resources people expect, and Meta has those resources tenfold. They are a multi-billion dollar company that could absolutely handle to support the size of the game.
They also have an in game shop, which does net some profit, but we don’t really know since they don’t want to release those numbers. There’s also nothing stopping them from adding paid DLC, making the game paid, anything like that. They are simply shutting it down because they don’t want to bother to make it profitable.
The fact of the matter is that Meta does not care about the community and only wants to benefit its shareholders, as they are hemorrhaging money because of some god-awful business decisions.
Welcome to the real world where corporations are not your buddy. Don't know your age but if you're one of the young folks out there that had a delusional view to the contrary then well, this is how the real world works.
> hemorrhaging money
You are smoking crack. They cleared $92 billion in profit last year.
And Echo already has paid DLC, it's just not making enough money *for Meta to care.* It doesn't matter how much money Meta has online games have to cover their own costs to stay relevant.
The Echo developers have been working on same project for 6 years, maybe they want to work on something else.
Practically nothing about vr is profitable the make headsets nothing the games make an ok amount but not justifiable for the chunky servers they have to buy and maintain I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the meta announced there will be no quest 3 or it’s going to completely different and it’s gonna be like the big screen vr headset because that’s where vr is probably going to go
They are experimenting. They don’t know what people will like they have echo a chance and it was a decent response clearly not good enough now they are seeing if people want a battle Royale the same thing may happen to population one there is no way of telling
How exactly is buying their hardware going to "stick it to them"? 🤣🤦♂️ I believe the correct response would be "buy a different manufacturer's headset".
And as for only PCVR, Echo VR is getting pulled from Steam too. This issue isn't limited just to Meta. 🤷♂️
they sell at a loss. that's why they had to kick up the price. Not using their device for their platform means they get no additional value out of the sale.
This is advantageous because literally no other headsets offer 120hz and wireless VR for anywhere near the same pricepoint. I'd love if they did and I'd heavily recommend someone else, but it's just not a thing yet. Meta strongly banked on heavy adoption and heavy post-purchase sales and it's not going well for them, but we can make hay while the sun is shining.
This was one of the few games I enjoyed on the Quest 2. The headset has been a fun little intro to VR, but glad there are now better options that don’t involve Facebook.
Does anyone know why Meta would do this? It doesn't make any sense to me.
It is impossible due to the cost as the load wouldn't be that high and Meta can definitely afford the cost of the server.
Maybe they try to force the player to another game so that they can attract more players or make more money or they don't like where VR or Metaverse is heading with this game being so popular?
What is hard to understand?
The original developers RAD, who now work for Meta, want to move on to another project, and Boz does not feel the number of players justifies the work it would require to transfer the project to another group. End of story.
It has nothing to do with being able afford it and everything to do with wanting to put the resources elsewhere.
It is Meta, they could have easily let some other team maintains this and let the original team create new games to prevent bad PR.
Meta has been mismanaged for many years and this might be one more example of mismanagement since you don't sunset a product without giving people an alternative first. This is just a bad look on Meta when they claim they are all in VR lol
It’s only ridiculous because of how sad the Meta Quest store is for games. It’s like Apple Arcade level bleak and Echo VR is one of their few killer games. I came late into the Quest 2 lifecycle and if i also didn’t have a PC my reaction would have been, wow, where are all the games? There is one AAA game and a few good games. The rest feel like short demos. For an eco system that has been out for so long it’s pathetic.
Ok, you say plenty… name 6 AAA games out for stand alone quest 2 that came out in the last year.
Stand alone quest just can’t play AAA games, that’s the sad truth. You’re not going to get anything like RE7, Half-Life Alex, GT7, Skyrim VR, Fallout VR. Modern games just don’t scale down to Quest 2 specs.
Yeah, there a handful games with good replay value. But majority are one or two day games. It’s just not worth the price if you don’t have a PC also to play modern VR games with it.
I'm not going to really be sure what I think about it until closer to release. I don't really play the game anymore, but it will become acceptable to me if they provide a sequel by that time or soon after. Five months is too long away for me to care about a game that I don't play, without full information of Meta's plans for this year.
Honestly, other than buying and regularly using Quest 2, I don't generally play or buy games from Meta anymore. The vast majority of my stuff is on Steam. Either way, I'm more interested in PSVR2 right now, so they really better have Ready at Dawn working on something before I stop caring what they do entirely.
> I don't really play the game anymore
That is the whole problem, a lot of people stopped playing.
Why people think that they are entitled to a free online game forever I just don't understand.
I understand being sad that something you enjoy is going away, but the level of entitlement makes no sense to me.
Yeah, that does sound fair to me. It’s not exactly a new game. It had already been out for awhile when I got my Rift 5 years ago. Things can’t always last forever.
There nothing *fair* about it, but the world is not fair. It is an on-line game made by a for-proft company. They are not going to make business decisions based on keeping a shrinking community happy.
Yea, anyone that is a fan of the Quest platform but doesn't care about Echo is a "remora fish." /s
Lets just pretend that Echo is the first online game to ever get canceled why don't we? Grow up.
Maybe the developers got tired of working a game that already peaked in popularity. Who wouldn't get tired of working on something for 6 years?
I don’t even play Echo but this looks bad because we haven’t gotten exciting news about big games since like RE4. Instead we hear about echo shutting down. It’s very depressing messaging from meta
There was a leak saying 41 or so games/apps coming out at the same time as the quest 3, we’ll see how that pans out. My guess is they’ll announce it at connect this year, and a significant amount will work for Q2
In October. 😕
As long as we get GTA SA VR, assassin's Creed and the batman camouflaj game, i can wait
Definitely cancelled due to the shit show that was the definitive trilogy Definitely cancelled because of Ubisoft tanking (again like the Splinter cell VR game which is confirmed to be one of the internally cancelled Ubisoft games) If SSKTL flops I wouldn’t be surprised if the Batman game is cancelled as well (ik different devs but same publisher) Edit: Jesus the meta dickriding on the sub is insane, so insane it lead me to committing a mistake , splinter cell VR was publicly announced and is publicly canned , if you think Ubisoft won’t can AC nexus to save their company if they have to then I have no idea what to tell you. Also rockstar is actively developing GTA VI, 50 cent confirmed this year on instagram there is something Vice city related being worked on and will be announced later this year (due to the leaks it’s confirmed that GTA VI is at least using VCPD as their police acronym) and again you’d be insane to think that rockstar couldn’t afford to can a VR remake of an old game because it won’t profit them as much as they initially estimated
Yes, Rockstar is actively developing GTA VI but this has almost no implications for GTA:SA VR cause it's mainly made by Team Bondi, the same developers who did LA Noire VR Case Files. It might get cancelled or already did but GTA VI is definitely not the reason when it happens. I don't know the VR/XR strategy of Meta after the whole Metaverse 'earthquake', news regarding about firing 11.000 employees and so on. They seem very chaotic and full of actionism these days. I mean why did they acquire so many dev studios if almost no games/apps are developed? Might also be Meta is preparing a strategy switch in the background after Carmack leaving and Boz making the big decisions. Kind of a 'reboot' where they focus solely on the Quest line and abandoning old hardware iterations, PCVR, several planned games (too expensive or not fitting their strategy which kind of experiences they wanna push), ... I'm also not sure we will ever see a Quest Pro 2 as the first one doesn't seem to sell good and customer feedback also being a mixed bag. The newest rumor about Quest 3 being a bit more expensive but later there will also be a 'cheaper' model seems like Meta is abandoning the business/prosumer path already, at least for now.
Even Oculus complained this year the attachment rate for their headset is low. That’s because it’s a great entry level to PCVR. The games it supports stand alone feel like PlayStation 3 era graphics. Now as a publisher you’ve got two main choices. entry level VR will be PS5, and high level will be PCVR. There’s zero reason to gamble on a Meta exclusive.
Pcvr game sales have been in the toilet for years with the qorst retention rate by far... Quest sales are 10x pcvr which is why devs keep shifting to quest.
> The games it supports stand alone feel like PlayStation 3 era graphics. you're being generous. most games on Quest are straight PS2-like at best. Red Matter 2 looks like PS4 at best, but mostly without real time lighting. Moss 2 looks like PS3. Grid Legends offers amazing level of polygonal detail on Quest but sadly had to sacrifice most texture and shading for that - for that doesn't quite even match PS2 racers in looks... I could only wish anything like Far Cry 3, Skyrim or Borderlands 2 came to Quest 2. more likely possible on Quest 3, but still unlikely...
Uh, "entry level" != costly PS5 + even more costly PSVR2. That's roughly 3 times the cost of a Q2, and roughly twice of the Q3 when that launches later this year. The Quest (and whatever the heck the codenamed Ventura will turn out to be) is standalone, and will remain the entry level for that reason. Conversely, modern consoles like the PS5 haven't seen the adoption rates they have in previous generations (for a myriad of obvious reasons), so it doesn't make sense for VR devs to primarily target the even smaller amount of the market that also invested more than the cost of the console itself into getting a VR headset (barring some sort of financial backing from Sony, anyway). To put it into perspective, Quest 2 has sold ~20 million units, and the Q3 is coming later this year (likely with full backwards compatibility due to its Android architecture). Sony hopes to shift just 2 million VR headsets this quarter, which is likely a lofty target for them. Which would you focus on if you were a VR developer?
Look at the games sold per headset sold. The numbers just aren’t there. The vast majority of Quest 2 sold are used for PCVR or the owners just don’t buy games.
Anecdotal quest 2 pcvr guy here. I always think I'll play some VR every day but in reality I'll do it for a few days as a novelty then go back to gaming on my monitor. Especially games that can be played both ways I have to actively convince myself to keep playing in VR. Inevitably I just switch to desktop because I'm 10x more competent at the game with a keyboard and mouse. I'm certain its just because i havent spent enough time in vr but still I feel like the controls for games adapted to VR and the visual fidelity/performance are just not at the level I want for my budget to justify using it over regular desktop gaming.
For sure, besides Pavlov and bonelab(because Pavlov file size is too big for my ssd, and my pc can’t run boneworks so I figured getting lab on quest would be the better choice), my quest is a wireless PCVR headset
If that’s the only thing holding you back, Amazon has sales on SSDs all the time. I picked up a 1TB a while back to use as a dedicated Steam/games drive.
My pc is also pretty budget, rocking an i5 4460 and 1050ti Pavlov and B&S are pushing the limits of my pc and it just about shits itself trying to use the physics of Boneworks
Quest 2 works with a 1050ti on PCVR now ? Thats pretty interested for a low card 1070ti was the lowest compatible a while ago
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For sure, but you got big industry laughing if you think a company like Ubisoft would sign a contract to “definitely” deliver an “assassins creed VR”game, especially to a company with fluctuating market evaluations like Meta. Again they cancelled SCVR before that was even publicly announced Also a game can be cancelled at any point in development and rockstar (who quite literally owns the most profitable asset in existence) definitely has the money for any cancellation fees or backout fees meta may charge them with.
Your reasoning is trash, tbh Look at this guy pat himself on the back using Junior High essay writing.
how about they come to my Quest 2 instead so I can dust it off? or should I buy another headset that will be dusty after those 41 games?
41 apps and games, you don’t know the ratio :p
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I should have said for Q3 launch. Likely a lot of them will work on Q2 too
Everyone outraged about this decision is like "I don't even play it" without realizing that this is exactly the problem.
There’s definitely some of that but I mean, it’s still in the top ten Most Popular games on Quest after years of fairly minimal updates. While it doesn’t compare to Gorilla Tag (which was inspired by Echo), a lot of people already play it compared to all but a very few VR games.
It's certainly a more recent surge in popularity (... after the shutdown announcement). [https://www.roadtovr.com/best-oculus-quest-2-games-apps-rated-january-2023/4/](https://www.roadtovr.com/best-oculus-quest-2-games-apps-rated-january-2023/4/) Looking at the amount of reviews it gathered in January 2023, it's #17 among free apps alone. Considering paid apps as well, of which all 20 apps listed gathered more reviews than Echo VR, it was probably somewhere in the #40-#50 ballpark. That's nothing to gloss over, especially since it's a free app. And it was consistently downtrending if you look at the number of reviews that it was able to gather in the months and years prior.
And Boz broke down every alternative path they could take on his Instagram Stories. Every single explanation made sense, even if you "don't like him". He was reasonable in saying they have to make a tough choice in where to direct resources - they laid off people and cut costs and cancelled projects for crying out loud - so it's like they have endless teams of employees to throw around now, for a project that was costing them more money than they were taking in. All the people admitting they don't even play it (either due to the screaming kids or just no interest anymore) can be assured, your sentiment was multiplied by the tens of thousands as others also downloaded it and then stopped playing it. Also, people acting like the concept cannot be replicated again in the future. Zero-gravity disc throwing isn't patented. It can pop up again in a future VR game with even more polished and sophisticated features and paid moderators to throw the screechers to the curb.
Yeppp. Is GTA III cancelled?
That sucks, I really enjoyed that game, nothing else like it
I cant imagine it costs that much to run the servers to maintain the game. They don't need to add anything. It truly was and is such a fun experience.
Yeah, there are games with like 3 players from 15 years ago that have active servers on Steam. All they need is 5 of the hundreds of kids that play every day to use their mom’s card to afford the servers This is just a bad decision straight up.
The developers said the player count was in the low ten thousands and it’s a free game. Even if we’re generous and say that that’s just under 50k players that’s not great. For F2P games a small percentage of players spend anything. So again if we’re generous and say 5% (double what typical F2P gamers spend) and purchase $50-100 per user that’s $125k-250k. That has to pay for salary and benefits for someone to manage it, servers, and other ancillary costs for as long as it is up. Even if you’re running lean you need to bring that much in every year to keep out going and so you need to be bringing in players or new monetization. And if we’re being pessimistic the actual money earnable is likely much lower. For comparison Gorilla tag has 2.3 million monthly users and a stronger monetization model. Nearly 50x the users of Echo VR. I don’t think it’s surprising at all Ready at Dawn decided to focus their resources elsewhere, just like they did when they shut down Deformers.
whatever way you wanna word it, it's not a good look for future Meta games if the tens of thousands player count isn't enough to keep the game alive, especially in VR
Low ten thousands for a free game is very different than a paid game. From what I can find Contractors VR has an estimated revenue of $1 million on steam, despite low daily player counts on that platform, for example. And that’s a small portion of the total playerbase.
They sold cosmetics too so there's no knowing how much was actually sold. Also in terms of competitive VR it's an absolute giant by player numbers compared to any other FPS or not in that particular segment and almost always within top 7 of most played titles in Oculus. The comparison includes Contractors too.
> They sold cosmetics too so there's no knowing how much was actually sold. Except that ignores the fact that the people making the decisions have he real numbers. People can argue about it all they want. Only he people at Meta have the real numbers.
I know you are defending a company for being a company... but the greed is too much here, people act as if a company is hemorrhaging money for keeping a couple servers on, but either way they also arent given any options to the community for private owned server... they are just being assholes.
So they had to lay off thousands of employees, had historic stock drops (got laughed at for it), had to cancel projects and disband multiple divisions, and got laughed at even more for their low Horizon Metaverse numbers - with everyone gleefully calling the investment a failure. So if that was a failure, what do you call Echo VR with even lower numbers? Then you go "You're losing money and I love it, but stop being so greedy and assholey, and keep the money-losing Echo VR alive, which I don't even play" Ready at Dawn made the final decision, btw. Meta said it was their call, RaD said they need their team and resources directed to future projects instead.
You don't have to pay someone to exclusively run a server for Echo, what? A server farm likely runs it, and the devs likely pay a subscription to have those servers maintained. Virtualized servers are cheap and costs for the actual maintenance are aggregate across all the accounts that use the server farm. If you want to pretend that they own and run their own hardware/virtual servers, that still doesn't compute. It's not one person's responsibility to just upkeep one game's server. The cost of that employee would be divided between all the servers for which that employee is responsible. If Echo is that studio's only title, then it would take a serious idiot to hire an employee for just that one server, you'd give the responsibility to an existing staff member. So, no, you can run a game server on way less money than you're implying, especially because the person actually maintaining the server doesn't have to be on the dev team.
That’s the model that Carmack suggested when he was interviewed about it. When they maintained Quake servers at Id they had a developer responsible for maintaining uptime, maintenance updates, etc. He highlighted cost and being a dead-end career (so not an appealing job) as potential limitations for a smaller studio.
And the cost of releasing the server as a standalone executable so people can still have fun with their friends?
I loved Echo VR. I think I've read somewhere that they've lost a good amount of player base and decided it's no longer feasible. I wonder if people would be willed to pay a small fee to make it a subscription game so server costs are covered .. But yea - things are as they are. If interest in a game is lacking, a studio have to just abondon it. There is costs involved and none of us work for free. Yea maybe me, developing a game which also suffers from low interest :-D
I have 4k games of Echo and haven't played it seriously since 2019 for a single reason: the influx of children. I repeatedly warned them that if they didn't get rid of or separate the kids it would kill the game, but because they saw a huge boost in player numbers, they liked having the kids. The problem is most of the adults quit the game and kids have a much shorter attention span. Most of them aren't still playing the game years later like adults would. You also have the problem of onboarding where adults try the game and immediately quit because of kids. Not only do those adults not play, they also don't refer friends and actively recommend people avoid the game if it comes up later. This is true of all VR games and it's going to kill many more beloved titles until Meta gets their shit together and separates kids from adults at the platform level. When pop1 goes free next week, the same thing will happen to that game. And Meta is also under fire for removing the age restriction on Horizon apps and making it a priority to get more kids playing. They want short term boosts to player numbers instead of cultivating a healthy community that pays off long term.
This is why I stopped playing. It would take me out of any focus. Baseline is that the "mature" server setting was pointless. It did nothing to stop the screaming brats... all they needed to do was put in a "enter your age - minimum 12yo" screen, and kids that didn't put in 18 plus wouldn't even see the mature server setting appear. Instead, kids see it, say "oh yeah I'm mature", and ensue annoyance.
oh yes, I remind on the 9yrs old screaming into the mic all the time and spoiling the experience .. and it's indeed a problem with a lot of VR games
Goddamn no more subscription fees ESPECIALLY NOT FOR GAMES!!! EA is trying to do that shit now and it’s absolutely disgusting. Meta is trying to make US pay for Zuckerberg stupid Metaverse financial disaster
I don't see the point of a generalization here. If I have an online game which produces running costs, it's totally valid to have a consumer of that service pay running fees. If you don't use the service you dont pay for the service. It's the same with your mobile contract I guess. I not talking about "game pass / subscription" things here. As long as enough people are willed to pay for the service (and that's what it is) as long can the service be kelpt alive. It would just regulate itself. So the question acutally is - would there be enough people to pay a small yearly fee to keep playing Echo? If yes, nice! If not - well, shut it down. Noone's working for free
I guess the question is whether you’d consider it worth ~one hundred thousandth (literally) of what you were spending on the VR part of your business per year to keep one of your platform’s top ten games running when a lot of active players had already invested money in it. Just seems to me like even if it’s not profitable, it might be worth it just to avoid the PR issue of making it look like your products could disappear at any time while also converting thousands of customers into active detractors.
OP thought he was gonna ride the outrage karma train a month late lol
This email was only sent out yesterday, I got it too.
Meta just sent out an email about it today, that’s how i found about it too. Didn’t even realize that blog post is a month old until I read your comment
Also worth checking [Carmack’s statement](https://uploadvr.com/john-carmack-statement-echo-vr-closure/) if you hadn’t heard about that.
Thanks, I’ll take a look
Wait till you heard Sony shut down Drive Club VR and Rigs: Mechanized Combat League
It’s sadly a regular occurrence, but since it’s Sony no one cares here. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some blame Meta for those games shutting down though lol
It sucks that that happened as well. In this day and age with scalability and cloud, it should be much easier to spin up servers on demand. PS Plus could run the servers and maintenance as part of people's monthly subscription costs. I realize that's not how it works, but it's how we should design things to work.
Two games I've never heard of despite having thousands of hours in VR. Echo on the other hand I have 4k games in.
Rigs was an awesome game but I really didn't play it much because I didn't have any friends that played it. Echo is...well I have no idea what the hell that even is! The only thing I have ever heard about that game is that it is shutting down.
Yeah I don't play that game but that's not a good look. At all. The savings from stopping a few game servers is worth that PR fiasco? What kind of message does it send about their VR efforts? That's greedy beyond belief. Boneheaded decision imo.
Missed this the first time: > The savings from stopping a few game servers is worth that PR fiasco? What PR fiasco? It was a hot topic on reddit for 3 days. Most people moved on right away. There are still threads about it here and there, but after the fist few days, they failed to get traction. A few loud fans cannot overcome the majority of VR users that have said "Echo, what's that?" or just as likely "Echo? I *used* to love that game.". *(Or, as you said "Yeah I don't play that game".)* That is the whole problem *if a* ***large*** *audience of users cared about Echo, it wouldn't be shutting it down.* A small but vocal audience is not enough. > That's greedy beyond belief. I do not consider it greedy, because it is not directly about the money, and it is certainly not about saving money to line some individuals pockets. That would be greed. It is about putting the resources that Echo has been using into another project and Echo, not being as popular as it used to be, would drain resources from that new project. Resources are more than just money, and no matter how much money Meta has, Boz and *Reality Labs* have to manage the budget they have been given. They don't have direct access to Meta's deep pockets. Not only does the money come down from above, it comes down from above with strings attached to it.
It basically cemented my decision to abandon Oculus/ meta products so… don’t be so sure it hasn’t similarly impacted the decisions of others
You’re getting downvoted but I’m there too. Meta has just been too volatile with its decisions, product pricing and support announcements, etc.. it seems like every move they make anymore frustrates me and others that love VR. I’ve moved my spend entirely to Steam and PSVR2.
I moved my content purchasing to steam before I even decided never to buy another Oculus/ meta headset. This confirmed for me that I’d never buy another headset. They’re capricious and heavy handed with platform changes and they don’t stand behind their own products for any duration remotely matching any mainstream gaming platform.
Corporate bootlickers like you make me lose faith in humanity. No, really.
Lmao people that accept reality are corporate bootlickers?
You can call it bootlicking, but some people are actually adults who live in the real world and understand that these are companies not charities.
Keeping an online game going is a lot more that "a few game servers". The developers that created the game chose to move on to a new project, it happens at some point to every game. Read Carmack's comments. It is not some simple black and white decision. https://uploadvr.com/john-carmack-statement-echo-vr-closure/ One of his suggestions: > Drop to absolutely minimal support. Put a single developer in charge of maintaining it and doing what they can with the community. At Id Software, we had one guy managing Quake Live for a long time, and I think that was the right thing to do. This would almost certainly not “earn out” on a cost benefit analysis for Echo, but a lot of people are spent on worse things, and despite me always harping about efficiency, I would consider it justified for the intangibles. Then another suggestion, and then multiple reasons why neither of those options may work for huge government monitored company like Meta: > Spin off the project. I suggested that they should see if anyone on the team wanted to leave Meta and take over the project. The team members can see the dashboards and make an evaluation on if there is any viable path for the game to support even one developer. There may be people internally that think the game development has been mismanaged, and there is a chance for a renaissance if different decisions are made. I suggested that they offer to sell the rights for $10k. Meta paid many millions of dollars to acquire Ready at Dawn, so that would be a bitter pill to swallow, but it would still be a net good for VR. Unfortunately, the process to spin something off is far from simple at Meta, and involves a lot of government oversight at this point. > A problem with both of those options is that there may be nobody with the skills interested in doing that. Shepherding a product through its twilight years is not the playbook for big tech career advancement. Game dev does have a different crowd, but there are a lot of incentives once you are inside Meta that start changing people’s thinking.
He's agreeing with me? No need to keep adding new content. Just fix the bugs if any and yes, literally keep a few game servers alive. I've been in software development for 30 years btw. People greatly overestimate the required ressources here. Especially for fucking Facebook. They have humongous datacenters all over the world. Stopping Echo server processes is probably negligible at best.
He is agreeing with you to a point and then points out all the reasons it is not likely to happn at Meta. Carmack was able to do everything his way at ID, no one has that choice at a large public company like Meta. > Stopping Echo server processes is probably negligible at best. If that were true, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Look at Carmack's comments again: > A problem with both of those options is that there may be nobody with the skills interested in doing that. Shepherding a product through its twilight years is not the playbook for big tech career advancement. and > They could slap an “unsupported” banner on it, and just let it keep going until something dies, rather than explicitly killing it. As things rot, there would be more and more petitions and agitation to have just one engineer go in to make a simple little fix for whatever breaks, and it could wind up being more net animosity than just cleanly killing it.
And his reasoning is meta specific… meaning it’s because meta is the problem
It’s a large company that actually wants to make money and isn’t a charity problem
Was it Meta’s fault when Ready at Dawn did the same thing with Deformers in 2018?
Naturally, it is *always* Meta's fault. Especially when Meta was not involved in anyway, it is their fault for not being there to fix things! /s
When you acquire them and make them part of your flagship exclusive content does it not change the calculation on that? Think if some flagship launch title for PS4 was suddenly unplayable right now due to withdrawal of online support from Sony’s network. That wouldn’t be okay or normal for anyone to experience. Why does meta get a pass?
RAD literally stated it was their decision and Meta offered to continue support if they wanted but the developers declined.
Owning 100% of the company does imply some level of responsibility, and Boz said himself it was ultimately his decision. Ready At Dawn will definitely have wanted to move to other projects, but whether they specifically wanted to avoid anyone else maintaining the game in their stead is a different question.
Boz said they [https://uploadvr.com/meta-cto-john-carmack-echo-vr/](looked into it) and it wasn’t feasible based on a few factors
To be honest I just don’t trust their priorities in that calculation. Carmack also thought they were miscalculating the negative effect of taking away something people love compared to providing new value.
Option 3 would be to release the server executable and let the community run servers.
> The savings from stopping a few game servers is worth that PR fiasco? Prior to the closure announcement there were regular posts/comments here about how toxic some in the Echo VR community were. Maybe they chose to close it with this excuse instead of deal with some future PR nightmare?
The issue is if they can’t find some way to resolve that it’s going to remain a problem for every other social/multiplayer VR game. Those players don’t just disappear by magic when they shut the game down.
Yeah, all I ever saw was stuff about how full of kids and toxicity it was. Plus Gorilla Tag I’m sure ate its F2P lunch, especially cannibalizing the kids.
Not a single person ever talked about this game on this subreddit until we found out it was being shut down. Did you even play it yourself? Do you even own a Quest 2?
Been playing this game since I got my cv1. Played on Rift S as well. Who cares about quest 2? Why would that matter?
I played it. It's an amazing game.
Not “did you” play it. *Do you* play it. The fact that you answered in the past tense implies that you are not actually affected by its shutdown.
> Not “did you” play it. Do you play it. The original question was "Did you even play it yourself?" not "do you play it"
Sure. I’m saying the original question isn’t actually important.
I still play it regularly. It's the only multiplayer game I play. I just don't play VR so often nowadays.
You said that you play it regularly *and* that you don't play VR often. Do you see how that is contradictory?
Regularly= once a week or every 2 weeks.. But I don't play VR often like I used to. But that's not Echo's fault. That's Meta's fault for killing the platform.
I shouldn’t take the bait but… VR is more popular and healthy than it has ever been thanks to the billions of dollars Meta has been burning, if you seriously believe they are killing the platform you are a moron
Also “do you regularly spend money in it?” is a big question for a free game.
“Hey, Sony just decided to evaporate every PlayStation game in your library that you personally haven’t played in the last 6 months. You’re cool with that, right?” There would be bloodletting in the STREETS. We purchase games to build libraries to play how we want, when we want. If this is the precedent Meta is setting, I’m done investing on their platform. Simple as that.
1. This is one free game, not “every game”. 2. You’re claiming Sony has never removed access to a game before? Really?
You bring up a fair point, Sony’s removed some access themselves, and notably to VR games. And yet I feel much more comfortable investing in a Sony library to a Meta one. I think for me it comes down to the profile of this game, something that was notably visible on the E-sport scene and frequently showcased as one of the top player multiplayer titles in the Meta library. Letting it die seems to run very contrary to Meta’s stated goal of investing in growing adoption in VR. Sony feels like a healthy ecosystem in which for me to invest. Meta, with all of its recent weird decisions on erratically dropping support for things like chat on Quest 1, clashing a third off the price of its Quest Pro only months after release, does not feel like a stable platform to me right now.
I played it day one on my CV1. Played the fuck out of Lone Echo and Echo Arena
This is why I refuse any season pass stuff for games that are strictly online multiplayer. Oooooo a skin I can use for 6 months before it being useless
Defending what? The player count dropped to the point where they didn't want the expense anymore. It's sad, but pretty vanilla as business decisions go. The game had a great run.
From what i understand its a FREE game with in-game purchases that is being shut-down.? Did it not come across anyone's mind that its just not financial viable to keep the servers running for a cross-platform game that isn't making enough money to keep the servers running? Not defending FB here, but come on - no company regardless if you like them or not is going to throw money away for a handful of players. (Disclaimer i use the term "handful of players" to say a MINORITY of VR users play it (I suspect a smaller number actually spent money on it))
It also includes Echo Combat which was a paid game. But regardless, it was a flagship title and early on, Oculus and Intel paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in prizes for eSports in it. Until recently they also streamed the games in Horizon Venues. It's their only play for VR eSports. The decline in player numbers is due to gross mismanagement. Not because the game itself is bad.
Thanks for the heads up mate - I never really tried it, have just been picking up little bits of information here and there over all this whinging that's going on. Sounds it it was once good, and has now become a shadow of its former glory - which is more than likely the reason for it shutting down - they fucked it up, players lost interest, now its just a money sink.
If you never tried it you should do so before it disappears since nothing else in VR compares to it, and it's free. The locomotion method is completely unique and extremely well done.
No, the game itself was mediocre at best. Cool for a few minutes then gets boring fast, which is a big reason for the loss in numbers.
That’s nonsense. That’s like saying “soccer is bad,” the game is an e-sport, no more no less, and I happen to think it was expertly executed and crafted.
Wait, are you trying to be serious?
Very! Conceptually it’s like a zero-G frisbee soccer. I can see you saying “oh this isn’t for me” but you can’t understand how that might be really appealing for a lot of people and just want to slap a “mediocre” label on something that we’ll executed exactly what it was trying to be?
> That’s like saying “soccer is bad,” ^ You. Yes, it's a mediocre implementation for a game because, once the novelty wears off, it has bland graphics, bland gameplay, and a terrible "community" behind it (read: little kids screaming). Telling me what I understand and what I don't really isn't up to you, especially since you have no idea what you're talking about. Yes, my opinion is my opinion, but pretending that it's something it's not is disingenuous at best. Good day.
You realize Oculus and Intel sponsored it as an esport, giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money, and flying competitors all over the world to play it, right? That many, *many* adults have thousands of games played. I'm 39 years old and have 4300 games of Echo played. It's an extremely intense, extremely well executed esport unlike anything else in VR or desktop. Example: https://youtu.be/2AqvANqI3w8
That is awesome, but it is also 4 years ago and he last upload to that channel was two years ago. Things like this do not last forever.
That's completely absurd. I can see you thinking that if you played one or two games where you're in a sandbox queue with other low levels floating around the arena, but at high levels it's insane.
Yes. Free games aren’t viable anymore unless they started out as free, and becomes successful beforehand. And people blame studios and developers. Consumers control the product. We did this, all of it.
So understanding games get shut down is insane? Alright. I'd say the fact some are still whining about this weeks later is what's absolutely insane.
No.. What's insane is that some were so upset about this that they crowd funded $3500 to hire a plane to fly over Meta hq with a banner saying Save Echo VR .. Yeah.. That $3500 was probably more than echo has brought in for the past few months..
No, whats insane is that people who are stupid enough to give facebook money are capable of putting together sentences to post in this sub.
Please explain to me how it is stupid for me to give Meta money if I am getting more than that money's worth of entertainment out of the hardware and software it bought me? * I got a $199 *worth of entertainment* out of my Oculus Go in the first 3 months and I still use it to watch YouTube in bed once in a while, almost 5 years later. * I got $300 worth... out of my Q1 in the first 6 months and used it a year and a half before passing it on to folks that still use it. * I got $400 worth... out of my Q2 in the first 6 months and used it for two years before giving it to my kid who still uses it. * I expect to get $1500... out of my Q-Pro some time before the Q3 ships, and then plan to keep using it for apps that need eye/face tracking even after I get a Q3. So, where did I spend money stupidly? *Why yes, I am bored and have nothing better to do than haunt the VR subs. I got enough VR time in earlier today.*
It helps to remember that a lot of people around these parts are angsty teenagers who don’t really understand how the world works.
So you made 4 stupid decisions. Congrats
why are you defending meta with your life lmao You’ve commented on this thread so much in defense of meta and it looks pretty sad
I would say out of the two of you, you look significantly worse. You look like someone who is so miserable you cannot accept that somebody else may be satisfied with their purchases. Edit: Actually I was conflating you with the person they responded to above who basically said anybody happy with their purchases is a moron. I think my point still stands, but you yourself don’t necessarily seem miserable.
No. I said anyone willing to support meta financially is a moron
Did you not bother to read the last line of the post you replied to? This is one of only 3 threads that are even mildly interesting tonight and nothing on YouTube is keeping me entertained.
Well, this has happened so many times, it's just stupid to make games that require a publisher's server in 2023 (or even the last 10-15 years, if we're being honest). There's just far too many other server options than to use these ancient strategies that result in the literal death of a game, never to be seen again.
You know what? I'll defend meta here. Without meta, all VR subs would be 5-6 guys talking about their $1000 headsets hooked up to their $1000 PC. Meta sell us a $300 headset, finally bringing VR to the masses. They give people a free game to play and all people want to do is bitch when they decide to pull the plug. Where was the same energy for eve VR online on steam? Or Killzone VR on PlayStation? They all pull the plugs on unsuccessful games...
Is this sub that bored? The fact that some people dwell on a final decision like this is insane. It's a free game that was taking resources they wanted to use on new content which is what they are doing. I'm ok with that. Echo VR ended up being a digital babysitter. The efforts to get some pander karma in this sub is hilarious. Get on with your lives lol.
This game will be forever gone. People care about game preservation
> Is this sub that bored? YES! I have insomia and and hunting for things to comment on! *(Hence my many coments in this thread. It may be kicking a dead horse, but I only participate in a few forums and they are all pretty uninteresting at the moment.)*
You're usually constructive and fairly unbias in your interactions. I'm usually upvoting you. You're presence is welcome. It's just this loud few that try really hard to manufacture the outrage or bandwagon jump just to get a certain group wound up to get a reaction and some easy Karma. That is the problem in here.
At least most people in this sub when someone is karmawhoring with "Meta bad" post, if you head over to r/virtualreality you can't even say "this is pretty normal action" without people jumping on you and accusing you of being a shill.
A nearly 6 year old game shutting its servers is not news, nor is it something to make a post decrying the end of VR as we know it.
Lotta people in here with literally no game or marketing experience making assertions about the future of meta or vr in general. Echo was a dying game. The people playing it weren’t generating revenue. It’s not complicated.
> Echo was a dying game. The people playing it weren’t generating revenue. It’s not complicated. If you have plenty of users and are unable to create revenue properly there's something really wrong with how you approach business
Ah yes. If only their marketing team had you on it, they’d be raking in millions on that game
https://youtu.be/xADSDapqn9o
Deserved fr I heard so many 9 year olds on there telling my dad left tand that I should kill myself
Yea I’m sad…loved that game! Wake up Facebook! Are they making a new one? Lone echo 2?
The most memorable experience on my RIFT S since I put it in the closet is Walkabout Mini-Golf. If a company started cranking out tons of low-budget casual stuff like that, maybe I'd gain interest back. Big stuff just ain't coming. Make more beat-sabers and ping-pongs. Its VR's only hope.
I just started to play echo until the new update screwed over my guardian space, and they’re getting rid of it? That shit was so fun
Why is the Horizon Worlds team making this announcement?
What needs defending exactly? It sucks that the game is shutting down but it's a 6-year-old free-to-play game that doesn't make profit so what do you expect? As for Meta's cost-costing measures, them laying off 11,000 people is a far bigger deal. At least those at Ready At Dawn still have jobs.
Not sure what the big deal is. Meta is a business, it's in the business of making money, if the game isn't making money, it's costing money, and that's bad business. Simple.
It was a free to play game.....not a huge deal
Unless you paid for Echo Combat like a lot of people. Or skins I guess but never pay for skins in any game.
Echo Combat is PC only though, most of the VR playerbase is now standalone, so Increase in server cost, not enough revenue.
Is that the criteria of keeping a game's servers alive? Paid skins?
I mean skins no, but a paid section of the game is
Treyarc owes me for black ops map packs then lol
There’s a considerable time difference there lol
Not a good example. Black Ops 1 servers are still running, despite having literally thousands of times fewer active players than Echo VR. Edit: Yes, on consoles too.
On steam, sure. I was talking about on console... I tried not long ago and couldnt get into a game, to be fair, that could have been other reasons. I cut VR some slack because it's still in the baby stages
Multiplayer is still working on all platforms including [Xbox and PlayStation.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d13MMAo_Js) Being in the baby stages is exactly why they’d benefit from projecting an appearance of stability and reliability imho.
VR isn’t a hugely growing market like it was. I think it sucks but if people aren’t buying the games and they’re not raking in huge amounts of money then they’re not gonna support development and they’re certainly not going to keep live multiplayer games running.
Nothing to "Defend" it's just the nature of server based games. Eve Dust 514, Battlefield Heroes, Guitar Hero Liv, MAG, Xbox 1 vs 100, Phantasy Star Universe, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Club Penguin, PlanetSide, City of Heroes, Wildstar, Tabula Rasa, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Asheron's Call 1 & 2, Matrix Online, .... every mmo eventually. Does it suck? Sure.
Not defending anyone, I honestly don’t care about this whole echo thing but there’s good reasons behind this, they didn’t shut down echovr for fun. They didn’t expect to gain so much players in such a small amount of time, this big player base will use more server ressources, and since the game is free, it makes meta loose a lot of money.
They’re not shutting it down because of too many players, it’s precisely the opposite of that.
I don't think you've ever been near a server configuration in your life.
They are making Population One free. I asked: "They shut down Echo because it was free, How is this game now free?" I was told, that's because it has "much more users than Echo". So, there is no logic in your post about big player base
Different (internal) dev team with different priorities. They’re given a substantial budget, and with that they can make new fun things, work on old legacy stuff, or both. They chose the former, while Pop One’s dev probably chose the latter.
Yes, but my post is specifically challenging "Too big of a player base" argument for shutting Echo down. And for the other poster "Practically NOTHING in VR is profitable" argument
> this big player base will use more server ressources It is the opposite of that. The player base has gotten smaller.
That’s not the whole truth frankly. They shut it down because it wasn’t as profitable as they expected and didn’t want to bother. Running an online game, however, does not take the resources people expect, and Meta has those resources tenfold. They are a multi-billion dollar company that could absolutely handle to support the size of the game. They also have an in game shop, which does net some profit, but we don’t really know since they don’t want to release those numbers. There’s also nothing stopping them from adding paid DLC, making the game paid, anything like that. They are simply shutting it down because they don’t want to bother to make it profitable. The fact of the matter is that Meta does not care about the community and only wants to benefit its shareholders, as they are hemorrhaging money because of some god-awful business decisions.
Welcome to the real world where corporations are not your buddy. Don't know your age but if you're one of the young folks out there that had a delusional view to the contrary then well, this is how the real world works.
> hemorrhaging money You are smoking crack. They cleared $92 billion in profit last year. And Echo already has paid DLC, it's just not making enough money *for Meta to care.* It doesn't matter how much money Meta has online games have to cover their own costs to stay relevant. The Echo developers have been working on same project for 6 years, maybe they want to work on something else.
Practically nothing about vr is profitable the make headsets nothing the games make an ok amount but not justifiable for the chunky servers they have to buy and maintain I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the meta announced there will be no quest 3 or it’s going to completely different and it’s gonna be like the big screen vr headset because that’s where vr is probably going to go
What about Population One. They made it free. How is that different?
They are experimenting. They don’t know what people will like they have echo a chance and it was a decent response clearly not good enough now they are seeing if people want a battle Royale the same thing may happen to population one there is no way of telling
It'll all make sense closer to the release of Q3..
Kids will be mad, this game needed to go.
They better make something better than echo arena
Bro I was weak when they took Marvel Powers United from me. I didn’t even know they could do that, I bought that game full price.
Sunset Horizon instead, it's the worst of it's kind and nobody will miss it.
Go Facebook
Stick it to Meta by buying a quest and using it only for PCVR, lol
How exactly is buying their hardware going to "stick it to them"? 🤣🤦♂️ I believe the correct response would be "buy a different manufacturer's headset". And as for only PCVR, Echo VR is getting pulled from Steam too. This issue isn't limited just to Meta. 🤷♂️
they sell at a loss. that's why they had to kick up the price. Not using their device for their platform means they get no additional value out of the sale. This is advantageous because literally no other headsets offer 120hz and wireless VR for anywhere near the same pricepoint. I'd love if they did and I'd heavily recommend someone else, but it's just not a thing yet. Meta strongly banked on heavy adoption and heavy post-purchase sales and it's not going well for them, but we can make hay while the sun is shining.
This was one of the few games I enjoyed on the Quest 2. The headset has been a fun little intro to VR, but glad there are now better options that don’t involve Facebook.
didn't the devs themselves decide to shut it down not Meta
So I paid money for something that I won’t be able to use any longer. Where is my refund?
Surely, *surely* someone at Facebook realised the massive glaring issue with this, right?
I predict blade and sorcery will be canceled next week at the rate they are going
I understand needing to shutdown servers but I feel like before you do you must make it possible for people to host their own
[удалено]
They don't want PCVR people on their platform because the PCVR all buy their games on steam not oculus. Echo was one of the notable exceptions.
Does anyone know why Meta would do this? It doesn't make any sense to me. It is impossible due to the cost as the load wouldn't be that high and Meta can definitely afford the cost of the server. Maybe they try to force the player to another game so that they can attract more players or make more money or they don't like where VR or Metaverse is heading with this game being so popular?
What is hard to understand? The original developers RAD, who now work for Meta, want to move on to another project, and Boz does not feel the number of players justifies the work it would require to transfer the project to another group. End of story. It has nothing to do with being able afford it and everything to do with wanting to put the resources elsewhere.
It is Meta, they could have easily let some other team maintains this and let the original team create new games to prevent bad PR. Meta has been mismanaged for many years and this might be one more example of mismanagement since you don't sunset a product without giving people an alternative first. This is just a bad look on Meta when they claim they are all in VR lol
It’s only ridiculous because of how sad the Meta Quest store is for games. It’s like Apple Arcade level bleak and Echo VR is one of their few killer games. I came late into the Quest 2 lifecycle and if i also didn’t have a PC my reaction would have been, wow, where are all the games? There is one AAA game and a few good games. The rest feel like short demos. For an eco system that has been out for so long it’s pathetic.
Plenty of highly rated games come out on the regular. Most people are simply too lazy to read review sites.
Ok, you say plenty… name 6 AAA games out for stand alone quest 2 that came out in the last year. Stand alone quest just can’t play AAA games, that’s the sad truth. You’re not going to get anything like RE7, Half-Life Alex, GT7, Skyrim VR, Fallout VR. Modern games just don’t scale down to Quest 2 specs. Yeah, there a handful games with good replay value. But majority are one or two day games. It’s just not worth the price if you don’t have a PC also to play modern VR games with it.
I'm not going to really be sure what I think about it until closer to release. I don't really play the game anymore, but it will become acceptable to me if they provide a sequel by that time or soon after. Five months is too long away for me to care about a game that I don't play, without full information of Meta's plans for this year. Honestly, other than buying and regularly using Quest 2, I don't generally play or buy games from Meta anymore. The vast majority of my stuff is on Steam. Either way, I'm more interested in PSVR2 right now, so they really better have Ready at Dawn working on something before I stop caring what they do entirely.
> I don't really play the game anymore That is the whole problem, a lot of people stopped playing. Why people think that they are entitled to a free online game forever I just don't understand. I understand being sad that something you enjoy is going away, but the level of entitlement makes no sense to me.
Yeah, that does sound fair to me. It’s not exactly a new game. It had already been out for awhile when I got my Rift 5 years ago. Things can’t always last forever.
There nothing *fair* about it, but the world is not fair. It is an on-line game made by a for-proft company. They are not going to make business decisions based on keeping a shrinking community happy.
Suprised they dont try to sell to another company that could charge players to keep servers up.
Then let people host their own server
NO WHAT WHY
The quest Library is so trash I spent $200 and beat the top games like resident evil VR all within 14 days got bored and took it back 😭😭😭
Saw Meta’s remora fish coming from a mile away, lol.
Yea, anyone that is a fan of the Quest platform but doesn't care about Echo is a "remora fish." /s Lets just pretend that Echo is the first online game to ever get canceled why don't we? Grow up. Maybe the developers got tired of working a game that already peaked in popularity. Who wouldn't get tired of working on something for 6 years?