John Carmack, the former Chief Technology Officer at Oculus and the co-founder of the legendary id Software, has offered his thoughts on the upcoming shutdown of Echo VR, a first-person virtual reality shooter. Echo VR is particularly noteworthy because it's a first-party Meta production, with Oculus, too, operating under its umbrella, positioning Carmack as a key personality in this context.
While it does seem that Oculus is still a fairly profitable venture for Meta in the grand scheme of things, some of the projects developed to leverage its products aren't quite so lucky. Echo VR first came out in 2018, and it presented VR users with a comprehensive and finely tuned zero-gravity FPS experience. It's due to shut down on August 1, 2023, and though the community has already collected 17,000 signatures to save Echo VR from closure, Meta seems to have made up its mind.
While Carmack recently resigned from Meta to pursue different opportunities, UploadVR reached out to him asking for comments about the coming shutdown of Echo VR. The shutdown itself was announced by Andrew Bosworth via Instagram, saying that the resources going towards the development of the game would be more useful elsewhere. Carmack, however, disagrees with that assessment in a broad sense. "I believe in saving everything," he told UploadVR. While Carmack does believe that Bosworth's explanation of why the game would shut down was "honest and true," he did provide a few possible alternatives.
Specifically, Carmack said that Meta should either spin the project off or, perhaps, set it up on life support with minimum additional development resources provided in the future. The possible third option, according to Carmack, would be to "slap an “unsupported” banner on it, and just let it keep going until something dies," which would certainly be preferable instead of outright killing one of the best free-to-play VR games on the market right now. Meta might also open source the project, said Carmack, but he did note that this would possibly end up being "hazardous" for Meta in the end due to the various licensing and engineering solutions put in place for the game to function.
While Meta has many VR exclusives on offer, providing ample value to the end user, the closure of Echo VR brings up a serious concern: what happens when Meta decides to scuttle some of them down? Echo VR, in particular, came about as a continuation of the work done for previous versions of Echo that were built with Oculus Quest and Go headsets in mind. These, however, were made unavailable as Meta/Oculus focused on its newer devices instead.
Getting started with VR gaming in 2023 is a more challenging prospect than one might hope for, keeping the above in mind. Closed-down ecosystems such as that of Meta and Oculus present users with a sleek and streamlined experience at the cost of control over media, and Echo VR might be just the first of many future game shutdowns, should the company find them unprofitable.
Echo VR is available on Meta Quest, Meta Quest 2, and Meta Quest Pro VR headsets.
Source: UploadVR