John Carmack revealed he had a version of Minecraft running on the Oculus Quest with full positional tracking at one point, but said Facebook and Microsoft could never get the “schedules aligned” to properly send the game into production for the mobile headset.
New tweets from the technical VR guide at Facebook provide the latest detail on attempts made to bring Minecraft to Facebook’s Oculus Quest standalone headset. While there were clearly discussions between Microsoft and Facebook, there’s been no recent news of the game coming to the Quest and Carmack’s latest tweets give a little bit more context.
No decision or event in gaming fandom is without controversy, but as a mostly-outsider, it seems like Microsoft has turned out to be a pretty good steward of the Minecraft legacy. Still sad about no VR version on Go / Quest, but I can’t really argue with their priorities.
Then, responding to a user who said Minecraft on Quest would be amazing, Carmack wrote:
I had it running with full position tracking, but we never got the schedules aligned to be able to take it into production. You could still make yourself sick bounding up and down around the terrain, but walking around was great.
Minecraft is available for Gear VR and Rift but has yet to make its debut on standalone VR headsets like Go or the Quest despite strong support from the community and some efforts to bring over unofficial versions of the software. The last update from Microsoft was in September 2019, when it marked the issue as ‘under review’ on the company’s feedback tracker.
Carmack now works at Oculus for Facebook in only a limited capacity, after he transitioned to a consulting role in November last year.
