roblox

Roblox Developer Conference Attendees Receive Free Quest Pros Ahead of Quest 3 Launch

Meta, News, quest 3, Quest Pro, roblox, roblox quest, roblox quest 3, roblox quest pro, roblox vr, Social Virtual Reality, Social VR / Blake Jones / September 13, 2023

Roblox has done very well on Quest. When it launched on the standalone VR platform back in July, it managed to break one million downloads in its first five days, essentially making the online game the hottest social VR platform currently available on Quest. Now Roblox has also showered attendees at its annual developer conference this past weekend with free Quest Pros.

Despite being in direct competition with Meta’s Horizon Worlds social VR platform, there doesn’t seem to be any bad blood over the explosive growth of Roblox on Quest.

A message was sent to attendees at RDC23 this past weekend, stating that Meta is footing the bill to provide a heap of free Quest Pros, its $1,000 mixed reality standalone.

“The news is out! We want to give a special thanks to our partner meta. They have offered to provide all RDC23 attendees with Meta Quest Pro headsets to help you create the best Roblox experiences for VR,” the message reads.

Developers didn’t have to wait long, as they collected their free Quest Pros on site at RDC23.

During the RDC 2023 keynote, Baszucki also revealed that Roblox now features “over 50,000 experiences that are ready right now on Meta Quest.”

Roblox is currently available on the Quest platform via App Lab, however the company says it’s set for its “full” release on Quest sometime in September. Baszucki didn’t specify when, although it’s a good bet that the popular social platform will be a launch day title on Quest 3, which could come as early as September 27th during Connect, Meta’s annual developer conference.

The company also announced Roblox is headed to PlayStation in October, however it’s not clear if that will include PSVR or PSVR 2 support as well.

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Meta’s New First-person Shooter Aims to Highlight Improvements to ‘Horizon Worlds’

horizon worlds, meta horizon worlds, meta social vr, News, rec room, roblox, Social VR, VR Game, vrchat / Mike M. / August 1, 2023

Meta introduced a new game called ‘Super Rumble‘ to Horizon Worlds, something the company hopes will showcase a new generation of improved experiences on its own social VR platform.

Released after a successful beta weekend in May, the free-for-all first-person shooter is said to highlight new improvements to Horizon Worlds, such as “better graphics, deeper gameplay, and a variety of quests and rewards.”

Players can choose from six superpowers before each session, allowing them to outmaneuver opponents and develop their playstyles. Here’s how Meta describes each power:

Super Dash gives you super speed
Super Jump lets you launch into the air with explosive force
Super Ammo saves you from having to reload
Super Tough reduces the damage you’ll take from each hit
Super Net lets you immobilize other players
Super Punch lets you attack with a powerful punch

Super Rumble is aiming to offer a fast-paced experience, which serves up to two to six players, with each match lasting five minutes. The game also serves as a launching point for a new integrated system of player levels, quests, rewards, the latter of which includes avatar clothing, emotes, and nameplate titles.

Check out the action below:

We’ve seen a few first-party worlds alongside a number of third-party brand engagement experiences on Horizon Worlds since the platform launched in late 2021, however going the ‘full featured’ minigame route is a fairly recent move that has more potential to attract and keep users. It’s certainly helped Rec Room to become one of the most prolific social VR platforms to thrive on both VR headsets and traditional flatscreen devices.

Interestingly enough, this comes only one day after Meta opened Quest up the online gaming powerhouse Roblox, which is in direct competition with Horizon Worlds. Now, Quest users can choose between Roblox, Rec Room, VRChat, Horizon Worlds, and Gym Class to name a few of the top free social VR platforms.

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Roblox is Coming to Quest, Casting a Shadow on Meta’s Own Social VR Platform

horizon worlds, Meta, News, quest, roblox, roblox quest, VR Industry / Ryan Harris / July 13, 2023

One of the biggest names social gaming is coming to Quest. Roblox is home to tens of millions of daily users and user-generated experiences. “In the coming weeks” Roblox will launch on Quest, casting a shadow on Meta’s own social VR platform, Horizon Worlds.

A Curious Proposition

Meta confirmed today that Roblox is coming to Quest “in the coming weeks” starting as an Open Beta on App Lab before eventually graduating to a full launch on the main Quest store.

On one hand, the move is a win for Meta. Roblox is one of the most popular social gaming and user-generated content platforms; playing in a similar ballpark with the likes of Minecraft and Fortnite. Getting Roblox onto Quest brings a valuable and recognizable IP to the platform, along with a huge new social graph of non-VR players.

On the other hand, Roblox is very nearly a direct competitor to Meta’s own social VR platform, Horizon Worlds. Both Horizon and Roblox are heavily focused on social experiences and user-generated content. But compared to Horizon, which caters only to the smaller demographic of VR players, Roblox has some 66 million daily active players across Xbox, iOS, Android, desktop—and soon, Quest.

For comparison, that means the number of people playing Roblox every day (66 million) is more than the total number of Quest headsets ever sold (believed to be around 20 million).

So ambitious creators looking to build content for the largest audience (and largest return-on-investment) will see the scale tipped vastly toward Roblox over Horizon.

Whether or not Roblox on Quest will stifle the fledgling Horizon remains to be seen, but needless to say this is an awkward situation. Not just for Meta though; Roblox also represents a looming threat to other social VR applications like VRChat and Rec Room.

Roblox Content Compatibility on Quest

Roblox currently has some 15 million playable experiences for users to choose from, but not all (probably not most) will be suitable to play on Quest.

Meta says the Roblox Open Beta on Quest is a “great opportunity for the Roblox developer community to optimize their existing games for Quest and build new ones for VR while gathering input and feedback from the Quest community.”

That said, Roblox Corp plans to automatically enable VR support for some portion of existing Roblox experiences, though exactly how many is unclear.

“[…] we have automatically updated the Access setting for some of the experiences that use default player scripts to include support for VR devices. We have found that experiences that use default player scripts typically run well in VR without modifications. Automatically publishing these experiences allows us to seed our library of experiences that support VR devices,” the company says in its announcement of Roblox on Quest.

Presently it isn’t clear if or how the company plans to ensure that user-generated Roblox experiences on meet minimum performance expectations on Quest.

Modernized PC VR Support for Roblox

Roblox has offered PC VR support for many years at this point and the company appears committed to continue supporting the platform in addition to Quest.

Less than a month ago Roblox Corp announced that it would adopt OpenXR to future-proof its VR support, including for PC VR headsets. The update also included improvements to correctly synchronizing the player’s VR playspace and scale to that of the current experience.

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Meta’s Social VR App is Coming to Web & Mobile Soon, Alpha Begins for Members-only Rooms

horizon worlds, Meta, meta horizon, meta horizon worlds, Meta Quest 2, meta social vr, News, Quest 2, rec room, roblox, Social Virtual Reality, Social VR / Blake Jones / January 31, 2023

Horizon Worlds, Meta’s social VR platform for Quest users, is expanding with alpha tests of new members-only spaces, allowing creators to manage up to 150 card-carrying members in their private worlds. Meta says it’s also gearing up to release Horizon Worlds on non-Quest devices for the first time.

Meta is now rolling out alpha access to its new members-only worlds, which aims to let creators build and cultivate a space in Horizon Worlds. Each members-only world can have up to 150 members, although only 25 concurrent visitors can gather at any given time.

“Every community develops its own norms, etiquette, and social rules over time as it fosters a unique culture,” the company says in a blogpost. “To enable that, we’ll provide the tools that allow the creators of members-only worlds to set the rules for their communities and maintain those rules for their closed spaces.”

Meta says moderation responsibilities can be shared among trusted members, so creators can better control who gets in and who’s kicked out, however the company says its Code of Conduct for Virtual Experiences is still in effect in privately owned spaces.

What’s more, the Quest-only social platform is also going to be available on the Web and mobile devices “soon”, the company says, adding that rules will be made and enforced “similarly to how mobile operating systems manage experiences on their platforms.”

As it is today, Horizon Worlds plays host to a growing number of user-generated content in addition to first-party worlds. The release of Horizon Worlds outside of Quest would represent a massive potential influx of users and user-generated content, putting it in direct competition with cross-platform social gaming titans such as Roblox and Rec Room.

As a similar free-to-play app, Horizon Worlds offers an Avatar Store featuring premium digital outfits—very likely only a first step in the company’s monetization strategy. For now, the company says it allows creators to earn revenue from purchases people make in their worlds, which includes hardware platform fees and a Horizon Worlds fee, which Meta says is 25 percent.

In late October, Meta showed off a tempting preview of its next-gen avatars, although it’s clear there’s still a ton of work to be done to satisfy its existing userbase. Floating torsos are still very much a thing in Horizon Worlds, and that’s despite Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence that full body tracking was in the works. It was too good to be true.

For now, Horizon Worlds is only available on Quest 2 headsets in the US, Canada, UK, France, Iceland, Ireland and Spain—something we hope they change well before it ushers in flatscreen users.

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‘Roblox’ Rumored to Launch on Meta Quest in Late 2023

News, Quest 2, quest roblox, roblox, roblox quest, roblox vr, Social Virtual Reality, Social VR / Ryan Harris / January 12, 2023

Roblox already supports PC VR headsets in addition to every conceivable traditional platform out there, although a recent report maintains the metaverse powerhouse may land on Quest later this year.

The report arrives from The Verge’s newly released paid newsletter, Command Line, which was created by The Verge’s deputy editor Alex Heath.

In it, Heath reports Roblox may be arriving on Quest in the second half of 2023, however that “plans are subject to change.” Thus far, neither Meta nor Roblox has responded for comment.

This isn’t completely out of left field either. In the company’s Q1 2021 earnings call, Roblox CEO and co-founder Dave Baszucki said its free-to-play game made “perfect sense” for the Quest platform.

Still, creating a native Roblox app for Quest may not be as trivial as it sounds, and that’s despite the fact that the social gaming platform can run on even the humblest of Android devices. Like VRChat or Rec Room, the platform is awash with tons of user-generated content, and making sure that content can run on Quest 2 will require some performance hoops if the app wants to maintain its much famed cross-play functionality.

One thing is fairly certain though, if Roblox is coming to Quest, it probably won’t support Quest 1, as Meta is currently in the process of phasing out the headset for both first-party social functions and security patches.

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‘Turok’ Inspired Dino Hunting Game ‘Primal Hunt’ Coming to Quest 2 & Pico in January

htc vive focus, News, pico 4, primal hunt, primal hunt vr, Quest 2, roblox, VR Game / Ryan Harris / December 22, 2022

Phaser Lock Interactive, the VR studio behind Final Assault (2019) and Twisted Arrow (2017), announced the release date for Primal Hunt, its upcoming co-op dinosaur hunting game which pits you against a Jurassic Park’s worth of the mighty beasts.

Update (December 22nd, 2022): Primal Hunt is slated to arrive on Quest 2 and Pico headsets starting January 19th, 2023. The game is also targeting Vive Focus, however the studio hasn’t mentioned whether it’s launching concurrently on that headset.

Additionally, Phaser Lock threw out a new trailer which shows off some of its archery-based gameplay. The studio says that as you progress, dinosaurs become even more deadly with the inclusion of cybernetic implants, armor, and weapons such as machine guns, rocket launchers, and the lethal ion cannon—something that ought to up the ante as you encounter all of its different dinosaur species.

Original Article (September 7th, 2022): Called Primal Hunt, the cross-platform co-op game gives you a variety of armor and weapons as you track down and fight the deadliest creatures to have ever walked the Earth.

The game, which is inspired by the Turok series and TV show Westworld, is slated to land on Meta Quest 2, HTC Vive Focus, and Pico headsets sometime in early 2023.

The studio also released a short teaser video (below the article) and a few images, showing off what looks to be a bow-heavy hunting experience that features plenty of pushback from the native fauna.

There’s still much to learn about Primal Hunt. Here’s how Phaser Lock describes it on the game’s website:

Face the ferocity of a pack of Raptors, the strength and power of a Triceratops, and the terror of coming face to face with a 30-ft Tyrannosaurus Rex, all in VR!

With a variety of armor and weapons at your disposal, you are poised to become the ultimate hunter…if you can survive. As you master each challenge, your prey will also become more dangerous as they are outfitted with advanced cybernetic enhancements and weapons, including carbine machine guns, rocket launchers, and more!

The studio promises that more information is coming, and that’s there’s also the possibility of a closed beta coming at some point this year.

We’ll be keeping our eyes out for all things Primal Hunt as Phaser Lock promotes its first game in the past three years since it launched Final Assault out of Early Access of PC VR headsets in 2019.

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