Echo VR players committed to playing the game right up until the moment Meta shuts down the servers.
Launched in 2017 on the PC-based Rift and available on standalone Quest from 2020, the zero gravity multiplayer team sport Echo VR was a favorite hangout in consumer VR's early years. There was a petition to save Meta's first hit multiplayer VR title with nearly 30,000 signatures as well as pleas from community members and even former technical guide John Carmack weighed in.
But Meta issued its plan to "cease operations of Echo VR at 10 am Pacific" on August 1, 2023. When it was announced, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said "those resources could be put to other uses that I think will be useful to the now tens of millions of people who are in VR."
"I'll be playing when the game's shut off," Sony Haskins, a community builder and long-time Echo player, told UploadVR.
"I did the math...a couple years ago and I think it was like, I don't know, two or three months solid just in Echo," she said. "Echo was an opportunity for me to go somewhere and just enjoy - enjoy existing -- like having an activity that I wasn't obligated to do."
"A lot of times it's like that old Cheers theme. You know, the Cheers TV show theme where people know your name. Like these communities weren't so huge that you didn't know anybody. People would recognize you too, and that was nice."
"I just find it very sad to see that gone. I mean, I'm sure we'll all still reconnect in some ways and stuff and try to do that. But there's a sadness there for that loss."
