it is low pass By Junko RoettgersA newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of technology and entertainment, syndicated exclusively for The Verge Customers once a week.
“This is a very difficult time for the sports industry.”
When Chris Pruett, Games Director at Meta Reality Labs, returned to GDC this week for his annual discussion on the state of VR gaming, he didn’t hesitate to say anything. “I’ve been in this industry for almost 30 years,” he said. “This is the toughest period I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s tough for everybody,” Pruett said. “It’s hard for VR. We’re not immune to this.”
Pruett made the comments two months after Meta cut more than 1,000 VR-related jobs and significantly cut back on first-party game development. “We closed down a lot of our studios,” Pruett admitted. “And make no mistake: They were top-class studios.”
Meta’s significant cutbacks have caused unease among VR developers, especially since many third-party studios have made layoffs of their own. According to Pruett, Quest Store revenues are still expected to be slightly elevated in 2025. However, much of the growth of the medium has been driven by free-to-play titles GorillaTag And undergraduateWhich are popular among young teenagers with low disposable income.
Even older hardcore VR gamers “aren’t spending as much as they used to,” Pruett acknowledged. However, he did have a message of hope for desperate VR developers: They GorillaTag Players will not remain 14 years old forever.
“As you grow up, become adults, you’re looking for things that are more challenging for you,” Pruett said.
Additionally, these players likely won’t abandon VR entirely. “They’ve been playing it since they were 12 years old,” Pruett said. They are accustomed to a different kind of gameplay with a greater emphasis on social interaction, and are also much less prone to motion sickness than older players.
“We’ve never had young adults who were VR natives,” Pruett said. And while concrete data on what these players might do in the future does not yet exist, he suggested that older players might engage in games that retain some of the strange physics and social components of games such as GorillaTag And undergraduateBut with a lot more polish.
“I suspect they’ll continue to be a core group of players,” Pruitt said. “But the games they play will change, and the money they have to spend will change too.”
In addition to these older teens, Meta is also betting on consumers over 30 to discover VR in the next few years. “They watch a lot of movies, they watch a lot of sports, they watch a lot of Netflix shows,” Pruitt said. “But they don’t identify themselves as gamers.”
Pruett suggested that many of those consumers will not buy VR headsets for gaming, but rather as devices for viewing personal TV and 3D content. Meta has worked for some time to appeal to this audience, and reportedly has a lightweight headset with an external compute unit in development, which is expected to arrive sometime in 2027. The company has also partnered with James Cameron to begin 3D content production for that device.
Pruett suggested that these older consumers will still play a lot of games, even if they no longer identify as gamers. Their care may require a variety of games, including titles that can be played sitting down. “It’s a low-friction, comfortable experience for them, not a workout,” he said.
And while Pruett didn’t comment directly on the upcoming headset, he strongly urged developers who want to target an older audience to embrace controller-free interactions. “These guys are basically just doing hand tracking,” he said. “They probably won’t own the controllers, or use the controllers.”
Meta isn’t the only company looking to adults with more disposable income as the new target audience for immersive computing. Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro is optimized for consumers who are interested in media consumption and sit-down experiences, and Google and Samsung appear to be targeting the same audience with their $1,800 Galaxy XR headsets.
Big caveat: So far, there’s little evidence that that audience is actually big enough to move toward VR. Apple has reportedly cut production of the Vision Pro after weak sales, with IDC estimating that the company sold only 45,000 headsets last quarter.
Pruett himself admitted that the meta was betting on older players, calling them “a huge potential audience”.
“They are not present on the stage today,” he said.
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