VR is Cooked.

We keep rehashing the same thing.

The entire VR industry is trying to create worlds for “normies” to spend time in. We see movies like TRON, books like Ready Player One and Snow Crash and for some reason engineers decide that they too would like to play god.

In 2025 the single most successful VR product is a mass-market, entry-level headset that gained a huge pop-culture assist due to a global pandemic. In isolation we see this as an “early sign of user desire” but it could very well be a false positive.

In 2022 Quest 2 launched, outselling the original XBOX. This would be a fantastic thing for the VR industry, but we often fail to recognise this happened at a time when gambling, mobile gaming, console gaming, streaming services and crypto trading were all also at record high interest levels from the public.

We were all stuck inside and bored af.

I write this post after turning on my Quest 3 for the first time in four weeks which is more frequent than most. I wanted to do some internet research in my headset and listen to music. Instead I found myself needing to do 2 updates and that I’m logged out of Spotify.

No problem, my Spotify uses my Facebook account so it should be easy to log in. I click “Sign in with Facebook” and am greeted with the PHP login screen of Facebook.com???? Why is this not a one click “log in with my headset”?. I had forgotten my password to Facebook so I hit “reset password” and am now blocked from logging in due to suspicious activity detected….

This post is written from a MacBook, opened in frustration because I am tired of this.

We have now built a virtual Oasis. We have built a virtual maze of frustration, a place where little joy emerges.

The most worrying sign is that Horizon OS is now being adopted by third party headsets.

The problem is clear to me. The VR industry does not have enough people building good software for free. This would seem like an unreasonable ask, except when you look at every other platform shift, it’s been underpinned by a vast, extremely vast, ecosystem of developers building apps, packages, APIs and tools for free. Because they want to see it exist.

All good things in tech come from constraints. Right now the entire VR world operates on “when the internet is faster” , “the games will get better”, “Meta will patch that eventually”, “It’s still early”. It’s time to actually roll our sleeves up and take on the responsibility of building something we want to see in the world.

If we want the VR we dream of to succeed we need to carve a different path.

  1. We need to stop playing god. World building is fun, but in moderation. Most people just want to have fun, they don’t know what VR is yet.
  2. Games are NOT competing with Roblox or Fortnite. They’re competing with TikTok. If the dopamine isn’t there, VR will be automatically boring no matter how good it actually is.
  3. We need to stop waiting around for giants to build the future. They aren’t going to.
  4. VR won’t be built by committee. It will be built by scrappy developers, unofficial hardware and a weird-inefficient-chunky-but-interoperable layer on top of the internet.
  5. It has to be fast as fuck boiiiii. Any friction past putting something on your face is just too much for a consumer to handle. Build for your mum, not your ultra tech savvy sibling.
  6. VR can be small. It doesn’t need to be mass market for years. Focus on making it good, it will grow when it’s ready.

I’ve seen some people with similar strong opinions on VR, some working as low level as the engine, others working on just making great games people want to play more than 10 minutes of. These are great directions and could plausibly work. My honest opinions is that the hardware doesn’t matter, the software is the problem here. Users will happily play a low-poly VR game for hours if it’s fun and they can boot into it in less than 30 seconds.

Keep building.