alt Hacker News• Not just a Meta failure: 70+ years of VR history (including Microsoft’s Hololens flops and Apple’s Vision Pro stagnation) shows every major player slammed into the exact same wall: betting billions on “inevitable” infrastructure instead of experiences that actually answer “why VR?”
• The metaverse was never inevitable: Horizon Worlds peaked at 300k MAUs, cratered below 1k DAUs, and is now shutting down. Meta burned $73B building ghost towns; the real survivors (Beat Saber: $255M revenue, VRChat: 150k+ concurrent) succeeded by giving users embodied activities and emotional hooks, not empty virtual offices.
• Hardware wasn’t the problem: Quest 3 is cheap, comfortable, and capable. The comprehensive crash happened because giants chased AAA ports and productivity tools while ignoring what actually retains users: presence + community + meaning.
• Management-school case study, updated: The $70B lesson isn’t “VR died.” It’s that corporate metaverse bets failed exactly where indies and niches thrived.
Full breakdown of what works (and why the giants missed it) here: https://linernotesxr.substack.com/p/what-works-in-vr-lessons...
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VRChat won because it's a relatively open platform. That's it. The people in there spent money on Meta hardware when it was better but they would then use it only in VRChat.
If a big company embraced an open platform I suspect the space would be far successful. Still a lot of untapped potential.
VRChat is successful because someone can show up in a Goku avatar and start roleplaying. A DJ can stream their twitch steam right into an instance.
VRChat still has no real store system having people upload unity projects manually to use a custom avatar. There's an entire universe of potential revenue if a clothing, avatar, and instance space system was built into the client.