VR Slop

Here is a blunt critique of the Meta-centered VR ecosystem: I argue that Meta’s policies and profit motives, an influx of underage players, and a shift to free-to-play microtransactions are creating a co-dependent loop that rewards low-effort “slop,” encourages copycats, drives serious developers away, and degrades community and game quality - ending with a call to change spending habits and restore stronger curation to save VR.

VR is becoming a garbage heap where children are let loose to play amongst the filth. Don’t get me wrong, VR is an amazing technology, but there are a number of reasons it’s attracting underaged players, inept developers, a corporate greed, and more and more criticism.

Normally I would categorize each problem area and move through them sequentially, but in this case the players, the developers, and the platform are all supporting each other in some kind of sick, co-dependent relationship of abuse.

Let me explain…

First you have the developers, like myself, who saw a new and exciting technology open up a world of potential - VR was going to be something special for gaming. In VR we could build worlds and games that immerse players in fun and transport them across galaxies. We thought, let’s make a game and put a price tag on it, something comparable to other game platforms. If you build it they will come.

Then you have the players, early adopters were typically men between the ages of twenty and forty who were interested in new tech, and they jumped into VR with gusto. There were communities of players, social events, excitement about being able to explore a whole new medium of content. But there wasn’t much content, so many of them decided to make content.

So they set off to build games that could catch the wave of hype, and they built games with passion. It had to be passion because VR games are four times harder to develop than PC or Mobile games. But they made them anyway. It was then that the first problem started, and it wasn’t the players or the developers, it was the platform - Meta.

Developers were eager to get their games in the store, to figure out what was required to be on the platform. But Meta closed the gate, such was their resolve to keep the purity of their precious platform free from VR slop.

Dejected, developers turned to Sidequest, a third party platform that allowed them to share their games without strict gatekeeping. Side loading apps required some knowledge of computers and took some effort, but there was passion and persistence, the players endured. For a time, Sidequest was booming, but then Meta swooped in and hijacked their model making their own pre-release platform called App Lab. A year or two later, Meta merged App Lab with their main store, essentially opening the floodgates of low effort, unfinished, and in many cases broken games.

Players no longer needed a computer and were able to access pre-release titles or games to whom Meta had previously closed the door. But something had changed. The voice of the players was getting, for lack of a better word, squeaky. Christmas had come and Meta had capitalized hard on the gaming platform sales, kids soon ran rampant inside of headsets, and many of them were way below the age limit at the time.

Meta’s solution to this wasn’t to ban accounts and enforce policy, instead they lowered the age limit to meet the demand. A once vibrant and happy community were now inundated with screaming children. It was like someone let out a class of kindergarten kids into a nightclub and gave them all glowsticks - it was awful.

Developers started thinking of ways to deal with this problem, some added ways for players to pitch their voices down, but this was just a bandaid on cancer. Besides the cacophony, the kids refused to pay money for games, which started forcing developers to adopt the free-to-play model where they litter their games with in-app-purchases in order to make any kind of revenue. Apparently the children will spend money on a fancy hat, but not a proper game.

Meta was thrilled by this, they get 30% on everything, and along with their hopes of sucking more money out of children, they developed Horizon Worlds. For those of you who don’t know, Horizon Worlds is built by players using prefab models and existing 3D assets; basically people who want to make games but lack the skill to actually develop them. So Meta gets players, sometimes children, to work on worlds and games for them without lifting a finger. Meta promotes thousands of these half-baked games on the front page of their app store hoping to attract the hundreds of thousands of children like the Pide Piper, hoping they will buy the shiny, Horizon cosmetics.

The irony is that Meta’s Horison Worlds sucks so much that the kids don’t like it as much. They prefer the free-to-play games that were allowed to take over as Meta focused so much on Horizon Worlds, they all but dropped their standards of gatekeeping. There was a massive flood of broken, unpolished, unfinished games that blasted their way on to the store. We went from a few, exceptional games that had the privilege of being on the store, to any game anyone submitted.

Now we’re caught in a cycle of child want game free, free game want money, child spend money on hat, meta want child’s money, meta make Horizon Worlds, child no want Horizon Worlds, developer make game free, child like game free, developer exploit child for money, child no care, it child daycare after all.

The main problem here is that children don’t understand there are industry shaping consequences to their purchasing habits. By wanting free games, they are forcing developers to spend all their time trying to squeeze profits by working extensively on the in-app-store portion of a game rather than on actual game content. As you can imagine, selling candy to children isn’t as much fun as building a theme park.

This has caused another problem, copycats. Copycats are people that produce copies of successful games, sometimes using the actual art assets from other people’s IP, and Meta welcomes them into their store with open arms. When confronted about this, Meta denies the existence of copycats, saying they are protecting developers from copyright infringement. This was their stance even when shown an blatant copy of the most popular VR game - Gorilla Tag (images below). Seven of these copycat games, Gorilla Tag clones, existed at one time on the New Releases page of the Meta Horizon store, four of which were made by the same developer offering in-app-purchases.

Authentic Gorilla Tag Game Poster

Copycat Game and Poster

But here we are, with one of the most incredible technologies ever imagined turning into a festering garbage pile on which children play.

Yes, there are still amazing games being made, but they are getting fewer and fewer as VR studios around the world close their doors.

Yes, there are still amazing people and players to be found, communities that the gaming world doesn’t deserve, and especially not the VR world.

Yes there are still amazing developers working hard in a market that doesn’t support them on a platform that cuts their legs out from under them.

But is there still hope for VR?

Not unless players stop spending money in free games, developers stop leaving the VR space, and Meta stops promoting VR slop.