Fans of a long-dead Facebook-funded Oculus Studios VR game are devastated this weekend after organizers of the effort said Meta moved to stop their Discord group from pointing people toward the hosted game files.
Marvel Powers United VR was released in 2018 by Sanzaru for Rift platforms with a strong focus on co-op play. In 2021, it was shut down and its multiplayer servers were taken offline. Recently, a Discord group focused around a revival for the project with organizers writing late in the week that the project "will be closed and completely removed in the following days."
Postings from admins suggested their critical failure was pointing players toward the game's files hosted on a third-party service "to help legitimate game owners download the game".
"...we were unintentionally infringing on the copyrighted files belonging to Meta Platforms (MP)," a post to the Discord group explains. "As would be expected, they've kindly asked us to take down this project and any infringing files. Unfortunately this also means that we will not be releasing our multiplayer servers that were very close to being finished."
The posting suggests the Discord group itself is scheduled for deletion as well, barring a permissive response from Meta legal. Meta is scheduled to reveal its next steps in VR & AR at its Connect conference this week and the company has been testing a cloud-based PC VR streaming service in recent years that could conceivably bring Rift games to Quest, but hasn't revealed any details.
