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The VR version of PowerWash Simulator is getting the axe some 14 months after its November 2023 launch because developer FuturLab has higher priorities than "a platform which costs us more than it makes."
In a statement posted to Twitter today, FuturLab CEO Kirsty Rigden confirmed that PowerWash Simulator VR won't receive any more updates or DLC going forward, though the base game and all released DLC will remain purchasable and playable as normal. If you want to start playing the game or keep playing it, you will be able to.
"We absolutely love and believe in VR, so this doesn't mean that we won't support it in the future but we aren't able to continue with support right now," Rigden says. "We have been faced with a crossroads: we have a truly excellent and kind VR team who were working on a platform which costs us more than it makes, while also having a list of job openings that were looking to be filled on other projects. We took the decision to redeploy our VR team into those other projects/roles."
When you put it on the scales, Rigden says "I will always choose job security for my team" over maximum multiplatform support. The returns on VR simply made the platform unviable for this game – a candid assessment of technology that has grown and improved considerably since the earliest headsets, but has yet to reach critical mass or truly break into the mainstream. PowerWash Simulator is a huge success, the VR version was a standout among the Meta Quest 3 lineup, and it's well-rated on the Meta store, but even FuturLab could only keep it up for so long.
VR remains a relatively minor enthusiast market compared to traditional gaming hardware, and it's still dealing with a problem that will sound familiar to anyone who's struggled to find a job because they need experience to get a job. For VR gaming specifically, you need enough good games to attract enough players to sell enough headsets to bring in enough developers to make good games, all without pricing people out or making them fall over from nausea. It's a hard problem to solve, and it hasn't fully been solved yet. Singular experiences like Half-Life: Alyx and evergreen hits like Beat Saber have moved the needle, and options like PSVR2 at least put VR next to mainstream hardware as a cool attachment (with a fairly low attach rate), but VR hasn't yet exploded the way some emphatic early proponents probably would've hoped.
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