Meta is inexplicably holding back one of the best Oculus games

We called it a cross between Battle School Ender’s game and ultimate frisbee. We called him Final Fantasy X blitzball meets VR. It made two of our Best VR Games lists — three, if you count what I did for CNET before returning The Verge. It convincingly sticks you in the body of a robot inhabiting a zero-G arena where you must use your wrist planes, obstacles, teammates and even enemies to propel yourself to victory. It even happened own sport.

But now, echo VR (née Echo Arena) is killed by Meta (née Facebook). Facebook bought developer Ready At Dawn in 2020 after developing it echo VR is one of the flagship games For the release of Meta Quest (née Oculus Quest) and Rift S. Meta will not offer any refunds for in-app purchases, in-game currency or DLC.

In a blog post Claiming to be “open and outgoing,” Ready At Dawn says that’s because… well, it doesn’t really offer any good reasons! “This decision was not taken lightly by any means. But it was made for many good reasons, chief among them being the studio coming together to focus on our next project.

This is so. That and the ability to keep playing it (and its FPS counterpart Echo Battle) will shut down the servers completely by August 1, 2023 at 10:00 AM. It also unlocks a bunch of in-game rewards when you play a match.

It will never be clear to me why companies shut down their perfectly good games because they decided they could no longer “support” them. If they’re good, keep them around! There are worse things that the meta keeps throwing money at.

Admittedly, I haven’t played that much echo VR Like I wanted to, because I could never convince my friends to buy VR headsets and play VR games, and I didn’t enjoy playing this amazing team-based game with the foul-mouthed guys I usually find there. The foul-mouthed child phenomenon is not unique to echo VR, thougheither.

I’ll see you at zero-G on August 1st, I guess? And remember: the enemy’s door is down.