Mojang, the Microsoft-owned studio behind Minecraft, announced it’s dropping support for the original PSVR next year, leaving any hope for PSVR 2 support firmly at (bed)rock bottom.

As mentioned in the recent 1.21.30 (Bedrock) release notes, Mojang says that starting March 2025, PSVR users will no longer be able to play Minecraft on PS4. Not online or in single player.

“After you receive the final update, you will still receive updates on your PlayStation and be able to play without PlayStationVR,” the studio says.

PSVR support for Minecraft came as a free update to the PS4 version in September 2020, allowing users to play the full game, albeit with the DualShock controllers and not PS Move.

As the best-selling game in history, PSVR was essentially the only VR headset to boast real first-class support from Mojang; the Meta PC version was delisted after abandoning support in 2021, and the only advisable way to play on PC VR is the Vivecraft Java Edition mod.

What’s more, Minecraft is now in beta on PS5, however Mojang hasn’t mentioned whether PSVR 2 support is on the horizon, further curbing any hopes it may ever come given today’s news.

While Mojang hasn’t said as much—and this is simply my opinion—it’s unlikely PSVR 2 support will ever come primarily due to the headset’s relatively small userbase, and a few other factors at play.

Sony’s wavering confidence in PSVR 2 has also led it to release a tethered PC VR adapter for in August, severing its exclusivity to the PS5 game ecosystem. This happened only a year and a half after PSVR 2’s launch, leading some to believe the company is partially divesting itself of its latest VR headset.

Notably, the company didn’t throw gas behind PSVR 2 like it did with the 2016 original. Sony has released only a handful of exclusives, including Horizon Call of the Mountain, and VR support for Resident Evil Village, Gran Turismo 7 and the Resident Evil 4 remake.

Then, there’s Mojang’s parent company Microsoft, which has been fairly wary of VR gaming in general over the years. In 2023, the company not only pulled the plug on its social VR platform Altspace VR, but also dropped support for its entire WMR platform on Windows.

Granted, Mojang hasn’t outright denied PSVR 2 support, although it simply doesn’t seem like it will ever happen on PS5.

Kayak VR: Mirage (2022) is amazingly immersive, packing in a ton of environments to explore in both single player and asynchronous multiplayer racing modes. You never could paddle through the glaciers or meander around tropical coasts with a friend in real-time though. But now, thanks to today’s update, you can.

Initially released as in beta on Steam in mid-August, developer Better Than Life today announced that real-time multiplayer is finally here for Kayak VR: Mirage on all supported platforms, which includes Steam and PSVR 2.

The real-time multiplayer mode lets you and a friend explore together in free roam, serving up the core of the experience. Notably missing in its initial release is race mode, proximity chat and physics objects like the ball and other inflatables, the studio says. It also doesn’t include cross-play at this time, however the studio tells Road to VR they might add it in the future.

“Development on it started over a year ago and as it turns out, making a VR game with a character, holding a paddle, in a kayak, all physics based, work in multiplayer is no joke,” the studio says in a Steam update. “However we think it’s completely worth it as we’ve had a blast during our testing and can’t wait to hear what you think!”

Kayak VR: Mirage ranked in the top three most-downloaded games in the US, Europe and Japan in 2023, owing to its photorealistic environments such as ice caves in Antarctica, tropical locales in Costa Rica, storm waters in Norway, and the stark canyons of Australia. Its two-handed paddling, physics-based environment, and upper body inverse kinematics (IK) make it especially immersive.

If you’re looking to provide feedback on the multiplayer mode, you can head over to the Kayak VR Discord (invite link), where you can also stay in tuned for upcoming updates.

Casual card game Exploding Kittens is coming to VR for the first time next month, promising to bring all of the hilarity of the original game with more than a touch of added VR madness.

Launching October 3rd on Quest 2/3/Pro, Exploding Kittens VR lets you play with up to four other players online (or against bots) and strategically force your opponents to draw the dreaded Exploding Kitten and be the last person standing to win.

Originally created by Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal webcomic, Elan Lee and Shane Small, the game initially did gang busters on Kickstarter in 2015, reeling in $8.78 million to bring it to life. Since then, the game has been adapted to flatscreen and even got its own animated show on Netflix.

While you’ll be able to do some standard social VR stuff, like customize your avatar, chat in a 15-person social hub, and play mini-games, Exploding Kittens VR is also offering up some neat VR-native ways to interact with cards as well as a ton of unique 3D animations for added flair.

At launch, the game is slated to arrive with three modes, including Classic and Blitz mode with up to five players, or head-to-head with another player in Duel mode.

Exploding Kittens VR launches on October 3rd and is available to pre-order now on the Horizon Store, which is priced at a 10% discount for $18/£13.50/€18.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

The macOS 15 Sequoia update will inevitably be known as "the AI one" in retrospect, introducing, as it does, the first wave of "Apple Intelligence" features.

That's funny because none of that stuff is actually ready for the 15.0 release that's coming out today. A lot of it is coming "later this fall" in the 15.1 update, which Apple has been testing entirely separately from the 15.0 betas for weeks now. Some of it won't be ready until after that—rumors say image generation won't be ready until the end of the year—but in any case, none of it is ready for public consumption yet.

But the AI-free 15.0 release does give us a chance to evaluate all of the non-AI additions to macOS this year. Apple Intelligence is sucking up a lot of the media oxygen, but in most other ways, this is a typical 2020s-era macOS release, with one or two headliners, several quality-of-life tweaks, and some sparsely documented under-the-hood stuff that will subtly change how you experience the operating system.

Thrill of the Fight 2, the upcoming sequel to Quest’s most popular VR boxing sim, seems to be gearing up for release, as studios Sealost Interactive and Halfbrick Studios tossed out its first teaser trailer.

Update (September 16th, 2024): Announced early last year, we’re still waiting on gameplay, although the studios are chumming the waters now with a new live-action teaser, stating to “Prepare Yourself.”

The game is coming to Quest first, however original creator Ian Fitz says the team plans to bring it to other platforms eventually, which he notes isn’t due to “any contractual exclusivity or anything like that.”

Additionally, Fitz notes the Sealost Interactive team officially started work on Thrill of the Fight 2 in July 2020, but scaling the studio was an issue. “I abandoned that [internal scaling] plan and started working with Halfbrick, and we restarted the project together in January 2023,” Fitz says in a Discord post.

There’s no release date yet, however Fitz says we’ll find out “soon! ! and I mean soon!” The original article detailing the initial reveal and Halfbrick’s involvement follows below:

Original Article (January 23rd: 2023): Created by Ian Fitz and his studio Sealost Interactive in 2016, Thrill of the Fight focuses on realistic boxing mechanics, eschewing arcadey things like stamina bars and unrealistic knockout blows.

Thrill of the Fight 2, which is now in co-development by Halfbrick Studios, is bringing the much-requested feature of multiplayer mode. In a development update video (below), Halfbrick CEO Shainiel Deo reveals a few more features coming to the sequel: improved audio and visual feedback, changes to how combinations are scored, more gameplay variety to keep players coming back for more.

Halfbrick is known for developing both the flatscreen versions of Fruit Ninja and Fruit Ninja 2 and also their respective VR adaptations. The studio’s bread and butter however has been its slew of mobile games, including Jetpack Joyride, Battle Racing Stars, Dan the Man, and Shadows Remain.

In an update posted to Reddit by Sealost Interactive, series developer Ian Fitz discusses Halfbrick’s involvement.

“The reason I’m partnering up with Halfbrick on this is because I was comfortable it would help make the game I wanted to make. They want to make (and play) the same game I do,” Fitz says.

Fitz also broke down the division of labor, and how the sequel is being made in cooperation with Halfbrick.

“I made the blueprint. Sealost prototyped and proved out many of the mechanics and tech challenges. Halfbrick is putting together a release-worthy product and supporting it into the future. I’m in meetings with them every workday building the product right alongside them and making sure we don’t deviate from the original plan (which hasn’t been a problem because, again, they want to make the same game I do).”

Fitz notes the partnership with Halfbrick “doesn’t have anything to do with funding. This is just about having a solid production team and a plan in place to support the game post-launch.”

The studios say they’re aiming for release “later this year,” although that’s admittedly “just an estimate based on current progress,” Fitz says.

It’s still unclear which platforms are initial targets, however if the original is any indications, we’re liable to see it on Quest 2/Pro, Steam VR, and possibly also PSVR 2.

Human Fall Flat (2016) is getting VR support soon, bringing the whimsical, wobbly physics-based platformer to all major headsets. And you can thank VR modder ‘Raicuparta’ for that.

Raicuparta reveals Human Fall Flat studio No Brakes Games actually bought experimental VR support from the modder after having seen a video of some early control concepts at work. Although the mod was never released, it was enough to get the studio interested in hiring Raicuparta.

“I showed the video to the creators of the game, and they were very excited,” Raicuparta reveals in a Patreon post. “They offered to hire me, but that wouldn’t work for me at the time.”

While Raicuparta wasn’t directly involved in the development of the official VR port as it is today, the studio did implement the third-person control scheme featured in the recently released trailer, seen below.

“They then offered to buy the mod from me, so that they could eventually use the same “puppet controls” concept on an official VR port,” Raicuparta says. “I don’t think they really needed to pay me at all, so that was really nice of them.”

Raicuparta is known for adding unofficial VR support to number of games over the years, such as The Stanley Parable, Outer Wilds, and Neon White. Raicuparta also served up the game and mod management tool ‘Rai Pal’ to go along with their Universal Unity VR mod currently in development, which, much like Praydog’s Unreal Engine VR (UEVR) tool, makes it possible to inject VR support into flatscreen games running in the Unity game engine.

Working with Flat2VR Studios, an Impact Reality studio dedicated to porting flatscreen games to VR, Raicuparta also had a major hand in porting the soon-to-release Trombone Champ: Unflattened to all major VR headsets, which is slated to come among a rash of official VR ports, including WRATH: Aeon of Ruin VR, Roboquest VR, and Flatout VR.

Launching “soon” on Quest 2/3/Pro, PSVR 2 and SteamVR headsets, Human Fall Flat is coming with all levels from the game’s original release as well as extra content created by community members. There’s no release date yet, but you can now wishlist on Steam and the Horizon Store, with a PlayStation Store listing still pending.

The past few months has brought little speculation surrounding the name of Meta’s next headset, primarily due to a number of leaks from Meta’s periphery. A new leak, courtesy of serial dataminer Luna, however seemingly confirms what we all knew all along. It’s called Quest 3S.

Meta’s support pages now confirm the “Action Button” on Meta Quest 3S that I had previously leaked: https://t.co/vaCWeoksnv pic.twitter.com/uKuhluk4nC

— Luna (@Lunayian) September 13, 2024

The image above reportedly comes from a Meta support page detailing an ‘Action Button’, which seems to allow the user to switch between virtual reality and passthrough, an action that’s done with a tap of the headset on Quest 3.

Provided the image is genuine, it makes for the most direct confirmation of the Quest 3S name among a torrent of strong, but equally questionable leaks.

Back in March, an image from a now deleted Reddit post (preserved by Luna) showed an ostensible mock-up of a French language Meta store landing page, wherein ‘Quest 3S’ is both seen and named.

It’s still not clear the provenance of the image, although an official image of the headset itself cropped up in files found within the Meta PC client, confirming that the initial leak originally derived from either Meta or a close partner.

Then, in May, Meta-owned studio Magnopus briefly listed ‘Quest 3S’ as a supported device in their fitness game Alo Moves XR.

So now we’ve seen the headset, and we now know with confidence it’s actually named Quest 3S, what else is there to find out?

Here’s the rumor mill’s take: Quest 3S is said to have the same Fresnel lenses and display as Quest 2, although runs the same Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset as Quest 3, and comes with color passthrough for mixed reality experiences. It’s also rumored to target a $299 price point, and be offered in a both a 128GB and 256GB model.

With an FCC certification already on the books, we’re now waiting for confirmation of those specs and a big reveal at Connect 2024 kicking off September 25th – 26th, which seems all-but-confirmed to be the event to watch for all things Quest 3S.