Meta Is Killing Two Oculus Quest Games Without Explanation

Meta is ending support for two first party original Oculus Quest launch titles next year without explanation. UploadVR reports: The company sent out emails to all owners of Bogo and Dead And Buried II on Friday to inform them that these apps will “end services” and “no longer be supported” after 15 March 2024, five years after they launched. The Meta Quest platform policies require developers to give customers at least 180 days notice before shutting down an app, so this appears to be Meta complying with its own policy.

Bogo was a free virtual pet app designed as a demo of Oculus Quest’s wireless room scale tracking and hand controllers. It’s one of the few VR apps that adapts to the size of your playspace, keeping the interactable area reachable for small rooms while encouraging physical walking for those with larger rooms. Bernie Yee, a former Meta manager who hired and led the ‘Oculus REX’ team that developed Bogo (as well as Dreamdeck, Toybox, First Contact, and First Steps), lamented the death of Bogo on X, tagging Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth to ask that it be preserved on App Lab. Yee was let go in the first wave of layoffs in November last year, alongside multiple of the REX team. […] While Meta hasn’t commented on the decision, the use of now-obsolete SDKs and the lack of a team to update the app likely contributed to the decision to kill it, but it’s not clear why it couldn’t have been demoted to App Lab.

Dead and Buried II on the other hand was a $20 multiplayer shooter – one of the first FPS games available on the Oculus Quest. It launched with two game modes, a team vs team ‘Shootout’ and a free-for-all ‘Deathmatch’. An update just under a year later added three new modes: a 1vs1 ‘Quickdraw’ mode and two co-op modes, Survival and Horde. Given Dead and Buried II is a multiplayer title, Meta may be sunsetting so it no longer has to maintain the servers and related online services, as it also did with the much more popular Echo Arena back in August.

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