Bandai Namco announced that its hit puzzle-platformer franchise Little Nightmares is coming to VR in April.
Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes is slated to land on Quest, PC VR headsets, and PSVR 2 on April 24th.
Little Nightmares VR is set to connect with both Little Nightmares 1 and 2 in what developer Iconik Studio calls “a dark atmospheric adventure‑puzzle game where you embody Dark Six, a mysterious figure with the shape of a little girl.”
In it, you’ll navigate “a disturbing world, solve intricate puzzles, and escape terrifying giant foes in a desperate search to become whole again,” the studio says.
The single-players game is also set to be chock-full of disturbing environments filled with echoes of past events, whispers of hidden connections, and “signs that your journey is part of something larger,” the studio says, noting that confronting these mysteries means facing not only external threats but also the haunting reality of your own transformation.
You can now wishlist Little Nightmares VR ahead of its April 24th release on all major headsets: the Horizon Store for Quest 2 and above, the PlayStation Store for PSVR 2, and Steam for PC VR headsets.
Legendary programmer and former Oculus CTO John Carmack doesn’t think Meta’s developer incentive structure is healthy for the Horizon Store ecosystem, calling it “wasteful churn.”
The News
While Carmack departed Meta in 2022, concluding his “decade in VR,” the one-time Oculus CTO has never been one to mince words when it comes to virtual reality.
In a recent X post, Carmack lays out what appears to be a pretty clear inequity: why does Meta fund third-party titles when they’re just going to turn around and tax them 30% on every transaction?
“Companies like Meta subsidize third party developers in various ways to help grow their platforms, then take 30% of the developer revenue right back with the platform tax, which is a wasteful churn,” Carmack says.
John Carmack at Oculus Connect (2018) | Image courtesy Meta
To avoid unnecessarily circulating money between platform and developer, Carmack points to Epic Games’ fee structure, which doesn’t take anything from developers for the first $1 million per year in revenue.
“You would still need explicit subsidies to get certain types of games / apps created at all, but it perfectly rewards what you actually want: increased economic activity, versus a biased pre-selection process,” Carmack continues.
Tagging Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, Carmack muses whether Meta could even actually pay developers extra for early revenue instead of charging an initial platform fee—something radically different from directly hand-picking projects and applying its usual 30% cut.
Tim Sweeney at GDC 2016 | Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons
“If it wasn’t so easily exploited by buying your own app, a negative rate ‘earned income tax credit’ for initial revenue would actually be a good incentive for a platform like Quest.”
In response, Sweeney says the $1 million no-fee threshold works and hasn’t been abused, although that’s partly because Epic’s fees are relatively low to begin with—a meager 12% cut.
“There hasn’t been significant gaming of the system. Thankfully there are enough benefits to curation and reputation in having one >$1M app than to breaking it up into a near-duplicate set of <$1M apps. But this assumes a modest take rate. At 30% behavior may change,” Sweeney says.
My Take
PC gaming is much more flexible than Quest when it comes to sourcing games; PC users can choose from any number of store, including Steam, Epic Games Store, or GOG. This is unfortunately not the case for Quest.
But let’s not conflate the two too much though. Meta subsidizes Quest hardware to make back money with app sales—basically what console manufacturers have always done.
The wrinkle is that Quest users can download and install alternate app stores, like SideQuest, which uses Quest’s ability to sideload Android APKs. But it’s no real competitor to the Horizon Store, and I don’t expect it ever will be.
SideQuest | Image captured by Road to VR
It’s unlikely Meta would disable sideloading, although would-be competitors are probably still cautious from incurring Meta’s wrath. In SideQuest’s case, it’s now mostly an app discovery layer and installer, with many of its app listings now linking directly to Horizon Store.
And from what I’ve seen, I just don’t think Meta would allow real app store competition anywhere near Quest—similar to how Apple doesn’t allow Epic to bring its Games Store to the iPhone ecosystem—the subject of a massive 2021 lawsuit that Apple mostly won.
No competition means no incentive to change. And more importantly, it means nobody can swoop in and by flaunt a better fee structure (and free games) like Epic Games Store seems to be doing as it attempts to pry away users from Steam. Notably, Steam features a 30% platform fee that then descends to 25% after $10 million revenue, and 20% after $50 million.
Niantic Spatial has now made its WebAR creation platform ‘8th Wall’ free and open source, which also comes alongside a shutdown of hosted services.
Previously a paid service, 8th Wall allows users to create Web-based XR content for a variety of target devices, including smartphones, computers and XR headsets.
Now, as a part of releasing the underlying codebase, the company has officially shut down hosted services, including user logins, the cloud editor, and the web-based XR Studio.
The transition has been rolled out in stages, the company says in a recent blog post. In January, the team released the Distributed Engine Binary, which includes simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) under a binary-only license for both commercial and noncommercial use. However, certain capabilities, such as VPS, Maps, and Hand Tracking, were not included.
Now, the newly released open source version of the engine framework is available under an MIT license, though this does not include SLAM. Instead, it provides the core architecture and major AR modules, including Face Effects, Image Targets, and Sky Effects, the company says.
The team behind 8th Wall says we can expect further releases to include documentation, desktop tools, and runtime components the coming weeks as the project continues its transition to a community-driven open source model.
Niantic acquired 8th Wall in 2022 as part of its push to build a broader AR developer ecosystem around its Lightship ARDK platform. At the time, the company said it was its “largest acquisition to date.” Shortly after the deal went through, 8th Wall became part of Niantic’s developer stack, integrating into its Lightship as a standalone product.
Since then, Niantic sold off of its gaming division for $3.85 billion to Saudi Arabia-owned mobile game developer Scopley, which included the transfer of the company’s most well-known titles, including Pokémon GO, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now.
In turn, this has left Niantic Spatial to operate as a separate, independently-owned spin-off focused on geospatial AI and XR technologies.
Meta is facing a class action lawsuit in the US over privacy concerns tied to its Ray-Ban smart glasses. The company is accused of sending private camera footage to a Kenya-based subcontractor for manual review to train its AI models.
Allegations stem from an investigative report from Sweden’s Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, which is said to have uncovered a subcontractor in Kenya tasked with reviewing and labeling images and videos uploaded from the glasses.
Sources within the subcontractor report seeing videos of everything, from sexual activity, handling of financial information, to a host of other private activities inside homes.
“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording,” a facility worker told Svenska Dagbladet.
Array of Meta smart glasses | Image courtesy Brad Lynch
These so-called ‘data annotators’ are said to manually process and tag images: “draw boxes around flower pots and traffic signs, follow contours, register pixels and name objects: cars, lamps, people. Every image must be described, labelled and quality assured,” the report maintains.
Following these revelations, a class-action lawsuit (via TechCrunch) was filed in a US federal court accusing Meta of misleading consumers about the product’s privacy protections.
“Meta chose to make privacy the centerpiece of its pervasive marketing campaign while concealing the facts that reveal those promises to be false,” the lawsuit states, further noting that Meta’s own “face anonymization” layer does not work to obscure the private nature of the transmitted videos.
Meta did not offer a comment to TechCrunch on the litigation itself, however, spokesperson Christopher Sgro provided the following statement:
“Ray-Ban Meta glasses help you use AI, hands-free, to answer questions about the world around you. Unless users choose to share media they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device. When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do. We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”
While many use Meta’s smart glasses as Ai-assisted sunglasses, its Ray-Ban smart glasses line can be specifically fit with a variety of prescription lens types, which allows users to wear them all-day as corrective glasses.
Valve’s upcoming standalone VR headset Steam Frame is still shipping sometime this year, the company says, as it is now marked as “coming soon” on the Steam backend.
In a hardware news update last month, Valve announced that Steam Frame, Steam Machine, and Steam Controller are all being affected by the wider RAM and storage component shortage. Parts woes notwithstanding, Valve said in February that its goal was still to ship in the first half of 2026.
Now, according to the Steam backend (via SteamDB), Valve ha marked all three of its forthcoming products as “coming soon.”
Whether that means “soon soon” or “Valve soon” remains to be seen, although the company gave another vote of confidence in release plans in last week’s 2025 Year in Review.
Photo by Road to VR
“We shared recently that there have been challenges with memory and storage shortages, but we will be shipping all three products this year. More updates will be shared as we finalize our plans,” the company says.
Notably, Valve still hasn’t indicated prices for Steam Frame, Steam Machine, or Steam Controller. At its November reveal, Valve told Road to VR that it expects Steam Frame to be ‘cheaper than Index’, although the company didn’t qualify its pricing logic. This could put it somewhere between $1,000 (Index headset, controllers, SteamVR trackers) and $500 (Index headset only).
As for Steam Machine, YouTuber ‘Skill Up’ confirmed with Valve back in November the PC won’t be subsidized like a console. Alternatively, Linus Tech Tips has suggested the lowest configuration could fetch somewhere around $700, which was based on a custom PC built on comparable parts.
Whatever the case, we expect a ‘buy now’ button to unceremonious appear on the Steam Frame page at some point, as Valve isn’t exactly known for the typical sort of fanfare seen with other companies.
AWE USA 2026 is returning to the Long Beach, CA on June 15–18. As the most important annual XR event on our calendar, we’re excited to once again be able to offer an exclusive 20% discount on tickets as the event’s Premiere Media Partner.
Since I started attending AWE USA in 2018, the conference has grown in scale and scope, offering increasingly more interesting and valuable sessions, exhibitors, and networking. It has steadily evolved into what I consider the must-go event for the XR industry. It carries the torch of passion that ignited the XR space back when it was little more than kickstarters, meetups, and those crazy enough to believe that immersive tech was not only possible to build, but worth building.
That’s why I’m proud to announce that Road to VR is once again joining AWE USA 2026 as the event’s Premiere Media Partner.
In addition to our usual reporting from the event, we’ll be highlighting the most interesting sessions and exhibitors ahead of the show, and offering an exclusive 20% discount on tickets to AWE USA 2026. Super Early Bird passes are available until March 19th—there won’t be a better deal!
AWE USA 2026 will be held at the Long Beach Convention Center in California from June 15th to 18th, and it’s expected to draw more than 5,000 attendees, 3,250 exhibitors, 400 speakers, and feature a 150,000 sqft expo floor.
This year the conference is further growing its gaming and location-based entertainment (LBE) segments.
The gaming section of the show floor is not only growing to accommodate more exhibitors and attendees, but there’s a brand new LBE space dedicated to VR attractions, arcades, and activations.
Alongside the extra show floor real estate attendees can also expect a broader range of presentations and panels in the gaming & LBE track, with a full agenda coming soon. If you’re interested in featuring your game or LBE experience at AWE USA 2026, be sure to check out the upcoming webinar to learn more about the opportunities at the event.
nDreams, one of VR’s most senior game studios, announced plans to close two internal studios responsible for some of its most forward-thinking VR projects, which could also include a sizable number of layoffs.
While nDreams hasn’t officially shuttered Near Light or Compass at this point, the company says in a LinkenIn post that it could soon see a reduction of 78 roles across “all levels and multiple teams, including senior leadership.”
“Despite every effort to make our existing structure a success and avert this outcome, the VR games market remains challenging, making further changes necessary to ensure a commercially viable and sustainable future,” nDreams says.
nDreams spun up Elevation in 2022 to produce ‘AAA’ quality VR games. Elevation released its debut solo title Reach (2025) across all major VR headsets last year, making for a strong opening bid as the company’s remote-first studio.
That same year, nDreams acquired Near Light, a Brighton, UK-based studio known for virtual travel experience Perfect (2016) and single-player arcade shooter Shooty Fruity (2018). More recently, Near Light released PvP shooter Frenzies, which launched into early access in Quest in 2024.
In early 2025, nDreams opened internal an additional internal studio called ‘Compass’, which melded staff from both its nDreams Studio Orbital and nDreams Studio after a layoff round in late 2024 that affected 17.5% of the company.
Founded in 2013, nDreams has released a host of VR games over the years as both developer and publisher, including Phantom: Covert Ops (2020), Fracked (2021), Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord(2023), and Vendetta Forever (2024).
This follows wider turmoil in the VR games industry, most recently precipitated by Meta’s reorganization of its Reality Labs XR division and rash of first-party studio closures, which included the shuttering of Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR), Twisted Pixel (Deadpool VR), and Sanzaru Games (Asgard’s Wrath).
Here’s nDreams’ full statement below:
Our team was today informed of proposals to restructure nDreams, including a significant reduction in overall staffing levels. These changes would impact all levels and multiple teams, including senior leadership.
Since 2024, our staff have been divided across three internal studios: Elevation, Near Light, and Compass. At the core of the restructured business will be Elevation, which currently has around 120 staff engaged on unannounced projects. nDreams will also retain a lean group dedicated to XR R&D. Together, we will remain focused on delivering world-class VR and XR games.
Regrettably, the proposals include the closure of the Near Light and Compass studios, and a reduction in our Facilities, Talent, Shared Technology, and Executive teams, with 78 roles at risk of redundancy. Despite every effort to make our existing structure a success and avert this outcome, the VR games market remains challenging, making further changes necessary to ensure a commercially viable and sustainable future.
We’re committed to exploring every option to retain talent and will now enter a collective consultation process with the people impacted by these proposals. We recognise that this will be stressful and challenging for everyone affected and will be offering support throughout the process.
