EchoVR was once Meta's most promising virtual world. Its shutdown is a missed opportunity for its struggling Metaverse.
I feel a tinge of sadness as I rewind back to July 20, 2017, the day a pivotal virtual reality game leaped out from the blue to shed light onto the then-unknown medium. This early Oculus Rift game, developer Ready At Dawn’s Lone Echo, would rapidly become one of the first VR games to receive critical acclaim, standing alongside the likes of Job Simulator and I Expect You To Die.
Related But Lone Echo was always more than just some miserly, one-off, third-party paperweight. It was the beginning of Meta’s initial push into the consumer market, and when by all accounts it should’ve failed, it worked. I’d even go as far as to say Echo brought VR to life to an extent that Meta neither fully appreciates nor, based on its move to close the online component entirely, understands at a core level.
Echo VR is more analogous to Final Fantasy X’s infamous Blitzball mini-game than anything else. You and up to four teammates vie to capture the map’s only frisbee and carry or throw it through the opposite team’s goalpost enough times to win the game before they can do the same to you. The twist is that, once you and your teammates launch into the map’s massive canister-shaped arena, essentially anything goes as long as it works in zero gravity.
And yet, as interesting third-party VR games do certainly continue to emerge, Meta’s first-party worlds have only gotten duller, less interactive, and more boring in the timespan between now and when Echo VR first appeared in the summer of 2017. Instead of integrating its existing properties into Meta’s, er, “verse”, Echo VR is now slated to shut down for good.
Yet as we’ve already seen with Horizon Worlds or even with Oculus Rooms, Meta doesn’t replace the destroyed value for one person with equal value for 10 people, let alone equal value for just one person. If you purchased an Oculus Go or a Samsung Gear VR, your hardware purchase and many of your software purchases were soon invalidated by the release of the Oculus Quest, which immediately ate up Meta’s attention as older hardware became deprecated if not outright abandoned.
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