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.
Microsoft today announced the codename of its next Xbox gaming console: Project Helix. Details are very light, but the company says Project Helix will “play your Xbox and PC games.” Naturally that’s got us curious about whether or not PC VR games could be in the mix, but there’s no word yet.
Xbox’s newly minted CEO Asha Sharma today teased the company’s next-gen Xbox. She confirmed the device is codenamed ‘Project Helix’.
“Project Helix will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games. Looking forward to chatting about this more with partners and studios at my first GDC next week!” she said on X.
Aside from this brief tease, it seems there’s no other official info being revealed, though we’ve reached out to the company for comment. The line about the company seeking to chat with “partners and studios” suggests this is the first time Project Helix is even being mentioned outside of internal conversations. Rumors suggest the console will launch in 2027.
So we have essentially no details yet on what the company means when it says Project Helix will be able to ‘play PC games’. But the possibility at least exists that this could open the door to compatibility with PC VR games too.
Granted, PC VR lives almost exclusively within the Steam ecosystem thanks to Valve’s ongoing support for the SteamVR platform. And while it’s technically possible that VR games could run on Project Helix without Steam (thanks to OpenXR), VR on Project Helix would be largely a non-starter if the console can’t somehow access the Steam library, because that’s the only active marketplace for the distribution of PC VR content.
If Project Helix can be ‘fully unlocked’ and operate like any normal Windows PC, there’s no reason to think that Steam and SteamVR content wouldn’t be able to run on the console. But if Microsoft plans to keep the system’s PC support locked down in some way, then practical support for PC VR content is unlikely without the company’s express interest in allowing it.
Microsoft has a storied history when it comes to VR. Not only did the company make a significant attempt at entering the market with its Windows Mixed Reality platform (only to abandon that project after several years), but back in 2016 the company officially said that its upcoming Xbox One X would include support for “high fidelity VR” gaming. By the time the console actually reached the market in 2017, those plans had been scrapped.
While we don’t expect an about-face on VR support from Xbox itself, it will be interesting to see if Project Helix retains full PC capabilities, and thus the ability to run PC VR content.
South Korea-based XR company NP Inc showed off a unique solution to combat employee fatigue at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week, combining a small pod with a VR headset.
The News
NP, developer of the MUA app for Quest, unveiled MUA’H (MUA Home) this past week, a single-person pod unit designed to provide an immediate “digital detox and psychological restoration right in the middle of the corporate workspace,” the company says.
It’s not just a small box with a Quest 3 headset though. NP says Mua Home uses “non-contact sensors” to monitor six vital signs in real-time, including Heart Rate Variability (HRV), heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature.
All of this pairs with a VR headset to deliver a customized XR meditation experience via data fed into NP’s own ‘MIND-C AI’, NP says.
Image courtesy NP Inc
What’s more, the Seoul-based company says its Mua Home platform will also let management identify stress levels and proactively manage employee burnout risks, albeit using anonymized data so a boss can’t essentially spy on their employees individual health or wellbeing concerns.
At MWC this week, NP showed off a prototype version of the VR-pod, which featured carpeted floors, cushions, and sliding privacy door. Check it out in action in this YouTube Short.
My Take
Like many places, burnout is a pretty big deal in Korea. Recent statistics maintain that around 30 percent of young Koreans suffered from burnout over the course of 2024. It’s a multifaceted issue spanning stuff like excessive workload, bad company culture, perceived fairness, etc—but one of the common denominators in almost all modern offices is the open floorplan.
Open floorplan offices are supposed to create better flow, allow coworkers to collaborate more efficiently, and give managers more direct supervision. In practice though, they could even be counterproductive, as they tend to create noisy environments that lack privacy—two things that can reduce productivity and cause constant stress.
Sadly, the question isn’t how companies can reorganize their offices for better mental health outcomes from the start—if that were the case, open floorplan offices would be a thing of the past—but how they can make the largest impact with the smallest investment. That’s where our slightly dystopian cube comes in, which is actually trading on the idea of how small it is, and how simple it is to construct and place in an unused corner.
Image courtesy Amazon
Granted, NP isn’t the first company to think of ‘mindfulness nooks’. Many companies, including Google, Apple and Nike offer employees quiet rooms for things like mediation, naps, and silent prayer. Enclosed pods however color the issue in a slightly more malignant light. Amazon tried telephone booth-style pods back in 2021, and was widely mocked for essentially creating cheap ‘cry closets’, as the company is know for high burnout rates and some of the most draconian employee performance metrics.
Even in the context of a cramped Korean office, I’d consider these sorts of compact pods essentially a band-aid to a larger problem. To Mua Home’s credit, it at least has the ability to simulate a larger area while focusing on worker health and wellbeing in the process. Still, the optics are objectively terrible, as it conjures up images of stressed workers climbing into what is essentially a capsule hotel for their company-mandated mood correction. It’s all maybe a little too Severance for comfort.
Resident Evil Requiem (2026) hasn’t been out for more than a week, and there’s already a basic PC VR mod waiting in the wings.
While Capcom may have “no plans” for VR support, VR modder ‘Praydog’ has released a Resident Evil Requiem mod that lets you play the entire game with a PC VR headset— albeit with a few caveats.
While Praydog’s REFramework supports motion controllers across a host of Resident Evil games, the VR mod for Requiem is still a gamepad-only experience for now. Notably, early players, such as YouTuber ‘Beardo Benjo‘, liken it to a “first pass.”
Praydog has developed their mod suite to work with all games running on the RE Engine, so it’s likely the Requiem mod will see a fair amount of tweaking in the coming days. It’s still probably best to wait if you plan on playing it from start to finish in VR though.
It’s pretty basic for now, essentially only allowing you to play in first-person VR without much more VR-native considerations made, including menus, motion controls, or immersive affordances for cutscenes. Provided Praydog smooths out those issues, like they did with Resident Evil Village (2021) andResident Evil 7 (2017), it stands to become the most immersive RE game to date.
In the meantime, you can nab the mod for free over on Praydog’s RE Framework GitHub and following along with all of the nightly updates too. Additionally, you can support Praydog via their Patreon page.
Check out the VR mod in action, courtesy Beardo Benjo:
Meta CTO and Reality Labs chief Andrew Bosworth detailed why he thinks he might have failed VR gaming fans, and why some people are angry, noting that it’s probably because the “gravy train has come to a stop.”
The News
Bosworth took to Instagram for another one of his weekly Q&As, where he fields questions from followers. In yesterday’s session, Bosworth answered this: “Do you feel that you have failed VR gaming fans? With so many sunsets and studio closures?”
“It’s really up to the people to decide whether I failed them or not,” Bosworth says. “I suppose it does raise the age-old question: ‘is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?'”
Quest 3S (left), Quest 3 (right) | Images courtesy Meta
“Many of the people who might say I failed them would say so because they loved things that I gave them, and are mad that the gravy train has come to a stop. But I still respect that,” Bosworth says.
But it’s not the first-party studio closures and near full-stop on VR game funding that Bosworth thinks is the failure: it’s customer acquisition.
“I don’t think I failed them because obviously they’re already fans. They love the work. The people that argue that I’ve failed are not yet VR gaming fans, who I think could be—who we hoped would be by now, but who aren’t.”
The failure, in Bosworth’s eyes, is not having created the right product for people who haven’t already adopted VR.
“And I haven’t built the right thing, or the right software to get them into the ecosystem. That is the failure. That is what we’re trying to attack in new and different ways: is to grow the base, to make this thing sustainable.”
My Take
Essentially, Bosworth’s statement reads me like this: be glad for what I gave you, because you’re not getting any more. You have to realize that the only thing we can do now is try to get more people in… somehow.
But who are those people that Meta hopes to reach? And if they don’t want big, expensive single-player content that pushes the boundaries of standalone gameplay, what do they want? Meta’s strategy is too opaque to say for sure, but here’s my best guess at what’s happening.
For years, Meta funded big, polished single-player titles to prove standalone VR could deliver console-style gaming. That bought goodwill with core enthusiasts, but didn’t materially expand the addressable market, or drive recurring revenue at scale. That’s the only thing Meta is focused on now it seems, as the “gravy train” has effectively stopped.
Asgard’s Wrath 2 | Image courtesy Sanzuru Games, Meta
In that context, Bosworth’s “failure” comment makes more sense. It’s not that the existing fans weren’t served—they were. It’s that the strategy didn’t convert enough non-fans into regular, paying users. That, and Meta has always been the ones to ‘show’ other studios how to build VR games—what with best practices and all—but for the past few years it’s been less about best practices and more about being the only company with deep enough pockets to create prestige content for Quest.
But before running off to compare Meta’s pullback to Sony’s vis-à-vis PSVR 2, there are at least two rumored headsets on the horizon: codename ‘Griffin’, expected to arrive sometime in 2027 and possibly succeed Quest 3, and a slim and light, puck-tethered headset codenamed ‘Puffin’ or ‘Phoenix’, also expected in 2027.
That said, kids have been big revenue drivers since the release of Quest 2, which has directly translated to Quest 3S. As it is, Meta announced last year that younger users were helping to push a new emphasis on free-to-play content, which in turn has helped drive in-app purchases. Last week, Reality Labs VP of Content Samantha Ryan revealed in-app purchases increased by 13% year-over-year, which notably didn’t even coincide with a new headset launch. Quest has no real competitor in the West, so Quest 3S is likely going to be around for a few more years so younger players have an easy entry point and continue to drive in-app purchases.
And at the same time, Meta has effectively decoupled Quest from its Horizon Worlds social platform, which was dead weight on Quest. This has essentially left the Quest platform re-focused back on VR gaming, albeit created solely by third-party studios and not Meta itself. So, Quest is back to gaming without the Horizon Worlds faff mixed in, but it won’t have any new first-party sponsored content either.
In all, this feel less like abandonment and more like a tactical retreat. Meta is investing in VR more than anyone, not to mention upcoming AR glasses and possible quick follow-up to Meta Ray-Ban Display. Games will still come, and some may even benefit from Meta funding to some extent, albeit not at the same scale as before. At least as Meta presents it, the long-term vision is still there; it just needs more sustainable spending and a different model to scale.
Meta has finally brought VR’s favorite block-slashing rhythm game to its Horizon+ subscription service. If you were hoping to jump into Beat Saber’s (2019) massive swath of DLC content though, you’ll still need to toss out a few bucks.
The News
Horizon+ subscribers probably already know the score. Meta says in its terms and conditions that apps in the 100+ catalogue only include the base games themselves, and not free access to paid DLC, in-game currency, etc.
Normally priced at $30, the base comes with 62 free songs which arrived from its eight OST Music Pack drops, Extras, and Camellia Pack. Excluding the 26 purchasable Mixtape and Music Packs released over the years, Meta has brought a total of 239 paid songs to the game—effectively making the bulk of Beat Saber’s content paywalled.
Notably, Horizon+ members must keep paying the $8 per-month subscription price (or $60 annual) to retain access to games. Still, it’s not a bad deal—especially considering every new Quest 3 and Quest 3S purchase comes with a three-month trial.
Popular titles included in the 100+ catalogue include Ghosts of Tabor, Job Simulator, Red Matter, Cubism, Pistol Whip, Moss, Walkabout Mini Golf, Demeo Battles, and Asgard’s Wrath 2.
It also benefits from monthly game drops, with March including Arizona Sunshine Remake and The Pirate: Republic of Nassau. You can see the full list here.
My Take
Meta is essentially making Beat Saber free to all new users, many of whom probably would have bought the game anyway. Granted, that’s through a three-month trial, although it may be enough for users to personally figure out whether the calculus of Horizon+ shakes out in their favor.
It is slightly more insidious than that though. Once you buy a DLC pack for a Horizon+ game like Beat Saber, the sunk cost fallacy takes over. You need to either buy the game once the trial ends, start paying for Horizon+ indefinitely to keep the game and access to DLC, or part ways entirely—knowing you have DLC for a game you don’t actually own, (and will never get a refund for).
By putting its most popular first-party game in Horizon+ though, it says to me that not only is the game possibly nearing end-of-life (or at least end of any heavy-hitting DLC), but that Meta is attempting to make Horizon+ into its biggest revenue streams moving forward—because it’s certainly not funding games like it used to.
That said, Meta announced last month that Horizon+ had topped over one million active subscribers throughout the course of 2025. Nobody really knows how Meta defines “active,” or whether that includes users on the three-month trial, but the company doesn’t tend to reveal user numbers/sales volumes unless they reach significant milestones, making it a first any way you slice it.
At the Neon Genesis Evangelion 30th Anniversary event in Tokyo this weekend, Pixelity showed off its upcoming XR game EVANGELION: Δ CROSS REFLECTIONS, revealing it’s going all-in on hand-tracking.
The News
On stage at the event, game director MK Choi gave a quick overview of the game, noting that Evangelion: Cross Reflections will feature “controller-free interaction, utilizing hand-tracking technology that allows players to perform all actions using only hand and finger movements.”
Demo booths were available on-site, giving a few lucky event-goers a first public hands-on with the game. We haven’t seen a full demo session in action yet, although X user ‘togepytogepi‘ showed off a bit of the hand-tracking-based interactions, seen in the videos below:
From the video, it appears the user is punching, shooting and selecting specific buffs that trigger quick-time events, requiring the user to punch a series of stars in order.
While the demo appears to focus on combat and less on story elements, X user ‘EVA_Armaros‘ also managed to capture what appears to be the game’s first official hype video:
Evangelion: Cross Reflections is slated arrive as a three-part series based on the story of all 26 episodes of the original anime, with the first instalment expected to arrive in 2026. The studio hasn’t detailed target platform yet, however it seems fairly clear we can count at least on the Quest platform.
There are set to be new characters however, as following Choi’s presentation, four voice actors portraying the game’s newly created characters took the stage: Gakuto Kajiwara as Martin Dason Holloway, Hana Hishikawa as Rimi Okada, Tasuku Hatanaka as Tomohito Yagi, and Manaka Iwami as Erisa Nozaki.
On stage, it was also announced that global hands-on events are scheduled to take place throughout the year leading up to release this year. We’ll be following the studio’s X profile for more information in the meantime.
My Take
Although Evangelion: Cross Reflections could include support for standard VR controllers, the decision to primarily rely on hand-tracking essentially signals that it’s targeting much casual gameplay.
At least from the limited gameplay we’ve seen—which rightfully might even be in-progress tutorial stuff—it’s suggesting that Evangelion fans should probably expect something more in the vein of a VR narrative experience, similar to what we saw with Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom.
Personally speaking, I honestly it’s going going to be as on-rails as Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom, which felt like it was straddling passive film and dulled gameplay stuff. For me, it ended up feeling more like an extended demo (or brand activation) than something that really tapped into the immersive possibility of having your own mecha fighting robot.
Meta announced that its Horizon+ game subscription service topped over one million active subscribers.
Reality Labs VP of Content Samantha Ryan revealed the figure in a developer blog post, noting the service now boasts a games catalog of over 100 titles in addition to its rotating dip of monthly games.
Popular titles include Ghosts of Tabor, Job Simulator, Red Matter, Red Matter 2, Cubism, Pistol Whip, Moss, Maestro, Into Black, Racket Club, Demeo Battles, and Asgard’s Wrath 2. You can see the full list here.
Notably, this is the first time Meta has revealed active subscriber numbers for Horizon+, which was previously known as ‘Quest+’ when it first launched in 2023.
Meta’s Q4 2025 earnings didn’t offer much granularity when it comes to Reality Labs revenue, however since Horizon+ costs $8 per month, or $60 per year, this could put its revenue somewhere between $60 – $96 million.
Granted, that’s provided the company isn’t actually counting users of its three-month trial period as ‘active’ members, an offer that automatically comes with purchase of any new Quest 3 and Quest 3S. It also assumes the one million subscriber figure was relatively stable throughout 2025, and didn’t see any dramatic spikes that would otherwise skew that estimation lower.
Additionally, Ryan notes Meta had “a tremendous holiday season that was on par with our 2024 results — all despite the fact that we didn’t launch any new devices for the year.”
Furthermore, Ryan says that total payment volume on the Quest platform remained similar year-over-year in 2025, with in-app purchases making a +13% increase.
Meta announced it’s separating Horizon Worlds from the Quest platform, as the one-time social VR app is going “almost exclusively mobile” moving forward.
The News
“Our goal remains constant: to empower developers and creators as they build long-term, sustainable businesses,” said Samantha Ryan, VP of Content at Reality Labs. “We used to have a pretty well-defined audience for VR, but as we’ve grown, we’ve attracted new audiences—who want different things—and the onus is on us to make sure that each of these distinct groups can find the apps and games that appeal to them.”
Here, Ryan is referring to evolution of it userbase. In February 2025, the company announced that younger users were helping to push a new emphasis on free-to-play content.
Image courtesy Meta
“That’s why we’re changing our roadmaps to increase your chances for success. We’re explicitly separating our Quest VR platform from our Worlds platform in order to create more space for both products to grow,” Ryan said. “We’re doubling down on the VR developer ecosystem while shifting the focus of Worlds to be almost exclusively mobile. By breaking things down into two distinct platforms, we’ll be better able to clearly focus on each.”
This largely echoes statements made by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth last month defending layoffs affecting 10 percent of its Reality Labs, wherein he explained that higher costs and a fractured development process led to the decision.
“Having to build everything twice—once for mobile and once for VR—is a tremendous tax on the team. You’d rather grow a giant audience and then work from a position of strength,” Bosworth said.
While Worlds promotion is being removed from Quest’s suggested content feed, at the time of this writing Horizon Worlds is still downloadable from the Horizon Store for Quest. It remains to be seen when Worlds will be decoupled entirely.
My Take
While Meta has never shared concurrent user numbers for Horizon Worlds, one of the key limiters in the beginning was undoubtedly the need for a Quest headset to play. It wasn’t available on anything else, which is fine when you have a addressable concurrent userbase in the multimillions—something even the most popular VR platform can’t claim at this point.
Notably, before Meta released on Android and iOS in late 2023, other social VR platforms had already made strides in the direction of bringing support to mobile, including class leaders VRChat and Rec Room. So, Meta followed suit, and quickly found out that kids with cellphones were spending more time and money in Horizon Worlds than Quest users.
And ultimately, some of this came down to control. Ostensibly hoping to avoid publicly-damaging controversy from the get-go, Meta initially kept a fairly tight leash on user-generated content, including complexity and visual richness of worlds. Even now, user avatars are fairly basic, with the pipeline of customization funneled to purchasable accessories rather than user-generated avatars, like you might see in VRChat.
That said, Horizon Worlds experienced a much slower and rockier start than Meta likely thought it would following its initial release on Quest in 2021. In retrospect, Meta’s more recent decision to mix user-generated Worlds with actual VR apps in the Store feed was probably a last ditch effort to get Quest users finally interested in Worlds—even if by accident.
Scott Myers, Snap’s top executive in charge of Specs, has left the company ahead of the planned release of its consumer AR glasses.
The News
Myers reportedly left his six-year tenure at the company due to a dispute with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, tech outlet Sources claims, characterizing the dispute as a “blow-up” centered around the company’s strategy.
A Snap spokesperson confirmed Myers’ departure on Reddit, nothing that Specs are still on track for release this year:
“Scott Myers has decided to step down from his role at Snap. We thank him for his contributions and wish him the best in his next chapter. We can’t wait to bring Specs to the world later this year. We remain focused on disciplined execution and long term value creation for our developer partners, community and shareholders.”
Myers came to Snap in 2020 to oversee all aspects of Specs, including hardware, software, product and operations. He previously held senior positions at SpaceX, Apple, and Nokia, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Snap Spectacles (gen 5) | Image courtesy Snap Inc
This comes at a critical moment for Snap. In September 2025, Spiegel noted in an open letter that the company is heading into a make-or-break “crucible moment” in 2026, positioning Specs are an integral part of the company’s future.
“This moment isn’t just about survival. It’s about proving that a different way of building technology, one that deepens friendships and inspires creativity, can succeed in a world that often rewards the opposite,” Spiegel said.
The consumer version of Specs is set to be the company’s sixth generation glasses following the release of its fifth-gen hardware in 2024. As ‘true’ AR glasses (re: not smart glasses like Meta Ray-Ban Display), the device is ostensibly set to frontrun some of Snap’s largest competitors.
My Take
It’s uncertain why Myers left Snap; the company even disputed the “blow-up” narrative with TechCrunch, providing no other reasoning, which makes Myers’ departure an even greater mystery—especially on the eve of the company’s big consumer AR glasses launch.
Speculatively speaking, there is at least one recent sign that could point to trouble brewing in the background. Myer’s departure follows a recent move by the company to form a wholly-owned subsidiary dedicated to Specs.
Snap says the so-called ‘Specs Inc’ subsidiary will primarily allow for “new partnerships and capital flexibility,” including the potential for minority investment. More concretely, Specs Inc also insolates Snap from any potential failure.
Whether that betrays a lack of confidence is unclear, although the top executive who oversaw the release of the fourth and fifth-gen versions—notably the only two with displays and AR capabilities—doesn’t smack of confidence.
