Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City is officially coming to Quest, PC VR headsets, and Pico headsets on April 30th.
Developed by Cortopia Studios and Beyond Frames Entertainment, TMNT: Empire City is serving up a co-op supported campaign, letting you team up with up to three other tubular turtles as you battle against the dreaded Foot Clan.
Set after the fall of series’ antagonist Shredder, Foot Clan leader Karai looks to fill the power vacuum, coming from her native Japan to bring order to the chaos in the New York chapter of the Clan.
Image courtesy Cortopia Studios
Ace St. Germain, Beyond Frames Entertainment CEO and Creative Director of Empire City at Cortopia Studios, calls Karai’s approach to leadership “very different” from Shedder’s though.
“How she decides to lead is ultimately up to the players’ relationship with this world,” St. Germain says.
The short of it: the studio seems to have absolutely nailed the Turtles aesthetic and vibe, offering up seemingly a cel shaded universe ripped straight from the comic books.
Image courtesy Cortopia Studios
I’m looking forward to sussing out the game’s combat more than the 15-minute demo allowed, which will undoubtedly be a major component to this narrative-based VR beat ’em up.
What I can say though is it looked promising, as much of the melee action I saw seemed to be pretty tactical, requiring users to strike, parry, block and retreat from unblockable blows.
Ahead of its April 30th launch, fans can pre-order Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City on the Horizon Store for Quest 3 with a 20% discount off its regular $25 price, bringing it to $20. You can also wishlist the game on Steam for PC VR headset and Pico headsets today.
Social VR platform Rec Room, once valued at $3.5 billion, announced earlier this week that it will be shutting down in June. The studio says it never quite figured out how to turn a profit, though top avatar creator blueasis maintains the story is a bit more complicated.
If you’ve ever seen the weird little VRChat avatar ‘Brush the Marmoset’—a staple of Internet memes since 2020—you’re likely already familiar with blueasis.
While they’re one of the OG 3D character and environment artist on VRChat, they’re also the top creator on Rec Room, which gives them a fair bit of insight into why the platform’s decade-long existence is soon coming to an end.
Image courtesy blueasis
As one of the most well-funded VR companies to date, the Seattle-based studio attracted over $294 million since its founding in 2016. Its most recent round came in December 2021, bringing to the company $145 million and briefly giving it a $3.5 billion valuation.
Despite its popularity and enviable startup runway, the company said earlier this week it “never quite figured out how to make Rec Room a sustainably profitable business. Our costs always ended up overwhelming the revenue we brought in. We spent a long time trying to find a way to make the numbers work.”
In a thread on X, blueasis gives an insider perspective on why they think Rec Room is closing up shop. In short, it wasn’t a bad creator economy or lack of returning users; the company just sort of … bungled things.
“I joined Rec Room 1.5 years ago to participate in their avatar cosmetics program,” blueasis recounts. “I made lots of items (2000~) honed my craft, became the number 1 seller on the entire platform, met awesome creatives & talked directly with the team.”
Image courtesy Rec Room
“My estimation of the shutdown; overhiring during the covid boom, making promises they couldn’t keep, continually gambling on new players & tech before focusing on the core experience & existing players.”
Having joined in late 2024, blueasis says it was “immediately obvious that the community was unhappy.”
“Spending so much money on player acquisition, mobile, console etc, with little to no payoff, these users rarely became creators, rarely spent money on the platform etc. The people who cared about the platform, PC, VR, did! but they were neglected in favor of ‘growth’.”
It was ostensibly that gamble to push for rapid expansion that ultimately tipped the studio into its first big tailspin: in August 2025 the company laid off around half of its staff, citing costs related to a surge in low-level content flooding the platform from users on mobile and console.
“I think by the time they realized this it was too late, the numbers were already dire, so they had to keep trucking along in any direction that would make them revenue, which just meant more gambling new features to hope something stuck, AI pet chat bot was a big one people hated.”
Blueasis says the platform’s push for user-generated avatar cosmetics was “their biggest success,” which they reveal accounted for 60% of player spend, “outselling Rec Room original items by 10x.”
In September 2025—notably just one month after laying off half its staff—the company announced it was paying out more than a million dollars per quarter to creators. That’s a lot of money coming in, a lot leaving into the hands of creators, and surprisingly little captured by the company.
Blueasis highlights the popularity of the UGC avatar cosmetics program and its outsized share of player spend, although the platform’s modest rake on creator sales may also be a big contributing factor.
While the company retains 70 percent revenue after paying platform fees on first-party content, when it comes to UGC, Rec Room only takes a 30 percent rake. This leaves creators with the bulk of the revenue, meaning Rec Room retained far less from top-selling items.
In the end, low fees are usually a powerful tool to help acquire an initial userbase. But they aren’t a lasting strategy, especially when new users aren’t contributing to the ecosystem in a way that offsets costs. And it seems the studio got interminably stuck in that dangerous gap between aggressive user acquisition and eventual platform stability—and just never managed to climb out.
Black Mirror, the hit sci-fi anthology series on Netflix, is getting its own VR experience soon—set to debut at VR destination Infinity Experience in Montreal, Canada next month ahead of wider rollout.
Developed by VR studio Univrse and Banijay Live Studio, THE BLACK MIRROR EXPERIENCE is slated to mash up physical environments with VR headsets, drawing on themes of the award-winning television series.
According a press statement, The Black Mirror Experience creates a scenario that will “force visitors to make [the] same choices” as seen in the show, which explores society’s complex relationship with technology and the moral quandaries often faced by characters.
Image courtesy Banijay
“Groups are invited to the exclusive opening of Phaethon’s showroom – a tech giant about to unveil its most ambitious creation yet: LifeAgent, a robot designed to simplify your life, understand your desires, and help you become your best self. At first, everything feels seamless. Reassuring. Almost perfect. Until it doesn’t,” the studio explains.
The experience supports up to six players (ages 12+), and will be offered in French, English, and Spanish. It’s slated to launch first at the Infinity Experience location in Montreal on May 21st, however more locations will be announced “soon,” the studio says.
Notably, Infinity Experience operates in seven cities across North America. In Canada: Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary, Quebec City, and Mississauga. In the US: Chicago and Atlanta.
Created by Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror returned for its seventh series on Netflix in April 2025, produced by Broke & Bones, with Brooker, Jessica Rhoades, and Annabel Jones as executive producers. Black Mirror is primarily owned by Banijay Entertainment.
Polyarc, the studio behind VR puzzle-platformer series Moss, announced it’s significantly reducing the size of the company, marking another VR pioneer currently experiencing existential turmoil.
The studio released word via a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, noting that layoffs come amid an “unsuccessful team-wide effort to secure funding following the cancellation of a major project.”
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Polyarc says layoffs are affecting 30 employees. According to DevOps Director Alex Holodak (via UploadVR), the studio let go two-thirds of staff, putting the remaining team somewhere around 15 people.
Polyarc isn’t alone in its recent financial troubles. Rec Room, one of VR’s most prominent social platforms, announced this week it’s officially shutting down in June. Meanwhile, VR veteran nDreams, the studio behind recent action-adventure game Reach (2025), signaled earlier this month that it’s going through significant layoffs and studio closures.
Notably, Meta’s recent shift in priorities at its Reality Labs XR division not only came alongside the closure of a number of several internal game studios, but also the revelation it was pulling funding from a number of projects already in progress.
Polyarc hasn’t confirmed whether its now-cancelled project was a result of Meta pulling funding.
Founded in 2015 by ex-Bungie develo[ers, the Seattle-based studio self-published the first Moss in 2018, receiving not only near-universal praise, but also more than 120 global industry awards and nominations. Moss was released across all major VR platforms at the time, including PSVR, PC VR headsets, and the original 2019-era Quest.
Then, in 2022 Polyarc released the hotly-awaited sequel, Moss: Book II. which managed to nab the The Game Awards’ Best VR/AR Game and the VR Awards’ VR Game of the Year. Moss: Book II is widely regarded as a stellar follow-up, getting a solid [8.5/10] in our full review.
In 2025, the studio followed up with its multiplayer real-time battler Glassbreakers: Champions of Moss, which offered up a roster of 12 Champions for squad-based arena battles.
Meta announced it’s pushing an update to Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta smart glasses that’s slated to make nutrition tracking easier by letting Meta AI visually suss out food before you eat it.
The News
Over time, the company says that a user’s food log will inform “increasingly personalized insights that get more useful, helping you make healthier, more informed choices.”
Meta says it will be somewhat of a manual process though, as users need to prompt Meta AI to log their food in addition to inputting specific nutrition goals.
Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) | Image courtesy Meta
While we’re not there yet, Meta says in the future glasses will be able to understand what you’re eating and automatically log your food, which in turn opens up even more personalized nutrition insights since you don’t have to remember to log every meal.
For now though, the company envisions users asking Meta AI questions like “What should I eat to increase my energy?” which will output a suggestion based on your food log and fitness goals.
Meta says the new feature will be available to users aged 18+in the US “soon” across all Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta smart glasses, with its Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses getting the update sometime later this summer.
My Take
Meta doesn’t do health tracking; its smart glasses don’t track your heart rate, steps, activity, sleep (of course not), calories burned, O² levels—nothing.
Granted, they can link with Garmin smart watches which can do those things, although the glasses themselves essentially only act as a sort of audio relay, repeating the info sensed and stored by the Garmin app, meaning Meta can’t really do anything truly useful with the bulk of your health data. Notably, Meta smart glasses don’t tie into Samsung Health or Apple Health either, putting a majority of users’ health data out of Meta’s reach.
Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses & Neural Band | Image courtesy Meta
But it probably won’t always be that way. Meta seems to be leveraging what it can feasibly (and cheaply) do right now without having to cut any expensive licensing deals with dominant players in the smart watch segment.
The company does have a vector to get all of that data one day though. Meta Ray-Ban Display comes with a wrist-worn Neural Band controller that uses surface electromyography (sEMG) which lets users quietly write out messages and manipulate UI. I can imagine a near future where Neural Band has a packet of sensors similar to a smart watch, albeit without the display.
Provided Meta goes that specific route, the company wouldn’t need to integrate with existing health ecosystems at all for its future smart glasses. It will already have everything it needs to close the loop on what you’re eating and how you’re burning it off.
CD Projekt Red announced it’s working with Zero Latency VR to bring Cyberpunk 2077 to out-of-home VR destinations.
Zero Latency VR calls the forthcoming experience “based on the world of Cyberpunk 2077,” but built specifically for the company’s untethered, free-roam technology.
What’s more, the studios say they’re bringing the co-op experience to Zero Latency VR’s locations worldwide “soon”. At the time of this writing, Zero Latency VR operates over 140 locations across 30 countries
When it will release still isn’t clear. The studio says additional details about the experience will be announced at a later date.
Image courtesy CD Projekt, Zero Latency VR
In the trailer, we see running, gunning and team-based missions. Notably, multiplayer or any form of co-op isn’t available in Cyberpunk 2077 yet, making it the first time fans will be able to walk the streets of Night City together.
“It will allow players to physically move together through a shared space, offering a new way to explore the world of Cyberpunk 2077,” Zero Latency VR says. “This will be a self-contained experience capturing the atmosphere and style of Night City beyond its original screen-based format, as seen in the original video game.”
This follows a controversy involving prolific VR modder Luke Ross, who removed his R.E.A.L. VR mod suite following a DMCA takedown issued by CD Projekt in January for seemingly breaking the TOS regarding paywalled fan content.
Although Ross has since partially reinstated the mod suite for free, it doesn’t come with support for Cyberpunk 2077, as well as a number of other games that could prove equally litigious due.
Meta and eyewear partner EssilorLuxottica announced two new “optical-forward” pairs of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which are said to support nearly all prescriptions.
Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta smart glasses can already be paired with prescription lenses, although the latest pairs of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are coming with new ergonomic features: overextension hinges, interchangeable nose-pads, and optician-adjustable temple tips, things designed to give users a more custom fit.
Ray-Ban Meta ‘BLAYZER’ model | Image courtesy Meta, EssilorLuxottica
In a blog post, Meta announced it’s offering two new frame styles: a rectangular ‘Blayzer Optics’ design available in two sizes (Standard and Large) and a more rounded ‘Scriber Optics’ frame. Both come with a Dark Brown charging carrying case, with pricing starting at $500.
Colors include Matte Black, Transparent Black, and Transparent Dark Olive, although Meta is also releasing seasonal colors, such as Transparent Matte Ice Grey and Transparent Stone Beige.
Ray-Ban Meta ‘Scriber’ model | Image courtesy Meta, EssilorLuxottica
Both new Blayzer and Scriber frames will be available for pre-order in the US starting today from Meta.com and Ray-Ban.com, as well as at optical retailers in the US and and select international markets starting April 14th.
Meta also announced it’s releasing new lens and color options for Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) and Oakley Meta lines. New options include:
Vanguard Black with Prizm Black Lenses
Vanguard White with Prizm Rose Gold Lenses
Vanguard Black with Prizm Transitions® Ember Lenses (arriving later this Spring)
Vanguard Prizm Transitions Cobalt Lenses (arriving later this Spring)
HSTN Black with Prizm Dark Golf Lenses
HSTN Light Curry with Clear to Brown Transitions Lenses
Coming this spring and summer, Meta is also releasing three new limited-time seasonal colors for Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2).
For the Skyler style: Shiny Transparent Peach with Transitions Brown Lenses. For Headliner: Matte Transparent Peach with Transitions Grey Lenses. For Wayfarer: Shiny Transparent Grey with Transitions Sapphire Lenses.
