A hardware hacker group previously behind the PSVR2Toolkit says it’s effectively “jailbroken” PSVR 2 for PC.
When Sony released its PC adapter for PSVR 2 in 2024, it released the headset from PS5 exclusivity, allowing users to play SteamVR games on VR-ready PCs for the first time.
Still, Sony didn’t release enable every hardware capability, with tethered PC gameplay notably lacking features such as eye-tracking, HDR, and headset rumble.
Now, the hardware hacker group previously associated with the PSVR2Toolkit—an open source driver toolkit interfacing with Sony’s PSVR 2 PC support—claims to have “jailbroken” the PSVR 2.
IPSVR 2 PC Adapter | mage courtesy Sony
“[W]e can enable HMD vibration and eye tracking camera feed on PC,” says group member ‘tinybnuuy’, who also credits fellow programmers ‘supremium’, ‘tomoeko’, and ‘ShinyQuagsire’.
“[T]his has been 5 months in the making, we hope to release this soon so that everyone can play with it,” tinybnuuy says.
Sony’s official PC support for PSVR 2 (via SteamVR) disables key features like eye-tracking, HDR, and haptics. Early efforts however managed to pull eye-tracking data in some respect, but it was notably uncalibrated and not broadly usable.
By mid-2025, tools like PSVR2Toolkit enabled eye-tracking and controller haptics through a modified driver layer, although it still didn’t feature proper OpenXR integration (i.e., no universal foveated rendering), as mentioned previously by UploadVR.
Provided the team’s work truly is a ‘jailbreak’, we would expect to see full access to cameras, headset haptics, and possibly even an HDR pipeline sometime in the near future.
That is, provided Sony doesn’t see the jailbreak as a threat, as the company appears to have intentionally disabled those features on PC, effectively keeping them exclusive to PS5.
Meta’s Director of Games Chris Pruett revealed that Quest usage hit an all-time high in 2025, which helped over 100 games to generate more than $1 million in gross revenue last year.
Pruett announced in his ‘State of VR’ talk at Game Developers Conference (GDC) that not only has Quest usage grown year-over-year, but that Horizon Store developer revenue was also up “very slightly compared to 2024.”
“Similar to the overall games industry (Circana estimates 1% industry growth), the gross revenue generated by the Meta Horizon Store was up very slightly year over year,” Pruett says in a blogpost recapping the talk.
“While this might sound like a humdrum outcome, it’s important to note that 2025 did not (unlike the year we’re comparing it to) benefit from a hardware launch. As you might imagine, hardware launches tend to spike Store revenue, and holding steady in a no-launch year is a strong signal that ongoing Store investments are paying off.”
Chris Pruett | Image courtesy Meta
Pruett also revealed that premium app sales are still the largest revenue driver, although in app purchases (IAP) grew “significantly in 2025, by over 10%.”
“The trend points to further diversification of monetization techniques on the platform, and better aggregation of success across titles,” Pruett says. “While most IAP revenue went to a small handful of titles in 2024, it was distributed more broadly in 2025. The number of IAP apps that reached $500k or more in revenue was up 20%.”
As for gross revenue—which is notably before Quest’s 30% platform fee—Pruett says over 100 titles generated more than $1 million in 2025. While he didn’t offer a breakdown of which monetization models were most successful, Pruett did reveal that subscription revenue represented “a relatively small part of the overall ecosystem and is mostly not associated with video games.”
Some of of those games include UG, a free-to-play early access title popular with teens, HARD BULLET, a physics-based sandbox shooter ($20), and The Thrill of the Fight 2, a realistic boxing simulator ($20).
While the company has since shutdown multiple first-party studios in addition to laying off 10% of its Reality Labs XR division at the start of the year, Pruett says its Oculus Publishing arm will have “more [games] shipping this year” following over 140 games shipped last year.
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.
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.
