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Spent some time last night playing classic VR games and experiences that Steam says I hadn't opened since 2016 or 2017 when I got my HTC Vive. Proton Pulse, Redout, Radial-G, The Cubicle. Back when we were all experimenting and excited for what VR could become. Sad it didn't really pan out.

I don't know that Meta was really what killed VR, but it certainly fractured an already tiny user base. I'll always wonder what could have been, if they hadn't consumed Oculus. There were a fair number of experiences I'd have paid for, if they hadn't been trapped in the "Meta-verse".

Meta definitely had a hand in killing PCVR by prioritizing the Quest line and killing the Rift (and therefore had studios build directly for Quest instead of OpenXR) but I also think we never really found the "answer" to "why VR?" 99% of VR games could be flatscreen with some tweaks.

It's a difficult problem, for sure. Even now, I play MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries VR occasionally, but it's a much more draining experience, and at the end of the day I still think I'd rather build a physical cockpit if my goal was total immersion for that particular game.