This Week in VR: Zenith Leaves Nothing Behind on December 18, and Supernatural Gives You Until December 3 to Take Everything

Last Saturday I wrote that my Valve Index is not going in a box. It is six years old, it is still plugged in, and Valve still lists it as supported on Steam and SteamVR. On Wednesday two other things people had paid for came with dates attached, and only one of them came with a way to take your stuff along.

Zenith, 10:00 AM Pacific, December 18

Ramen VR posted the date on Steam on Wednesday. Zenith goes offline at 10:00 AM Pacific on Friday, December 18, and the FAQ underneath asks the question every player asked next, whether there will be an offline version or community servers. The answer is one line long: "No, not at this time."

Alex walked through the wind-down. New players can download the free client until November 18. Zennies, the premium currency, stay spendable until the servers close, and the post says nothing about refunds. The studio's own FAQ has said since July 2024 that most players "stopped playing Zenith after about a month," and Ramen VR, which once raised $35 million to build Zenith out, now describes itself on its website as "an AI company building agents for interactive 3D."

One page has not caught up. The announcement says sales of The Last City, the paid half of the game, ended October 21 "across all platforms." This morning its Steam listing still had it at $9.99. Do not buy it.

A studio deciding a game costs more to run than it earns? That happens, and I am not going to pretend Ramen VR owes anyone servers forever. What gets me is a paid game that leaves nothing behind when the plug comes out. Hyper Dash shipped a final update so it still launches offline after November 1. Ultimechs lost online play this week, on the schedule Resolution Games gave, and its Steam page now says the studio has "transitioned the game to a single-player-only experience." That was a free game. People who paid $29.99 for The Last City before the 2024 price cut get 56 days and then an app that opens onto nothing.

Supernatural wants your zip file

The other end date came with an exit. Supernatural reopened on the Horizon Store on Wednesday as a separate download, in early access, at $20 a month or $200 a year. Meta charged $10 and $100. Alex has the full breakdown, including the $180 first year for people who signed up as Founding Members before launch.

Doubling a subscription normally gets a groan out of me. Not this time. Before launch, the company's FAQ said the price was about "paying the team industry salaries with real benefits, sign our own music deals and invest in new features" (archived copy), and coaches plus licensed music are things that cost money every single month. That is what a subscription is supposed to pay for.

The part to act on is your history. A week ago the FAQ still had Favorites following "later this year." Now the launch post and the transfer page cover all of it, workout history included. None of it moves on its own, even if your email matches. You make an account at WeAreSupernatural.com, download a .zip of your data from the old Supernatural site while signed in with Meta, and upload it at sn.co/transfer before 11:59 PM Pacific on December 3. You do not need to be paying for the new app to do any of that. Points and your start date show up right away, and streaks, favorites, badges and the rest trickle in "over the coming weeks." Miss the deadline and, in the transfer page's words, "it can't be brought over."

Get the file this weekend. Meta's version of the app stops on December 3 regardless.

Two dollars, for glasses nobody has

Owlchemy's new game is $1.99. Hyper Visor is an eight-level arcade shooter where you fire a beam from your hand into rifts that open on your own walls, and it is a launch title for XREAL's AURA glasses on Google Play. AURA does not have a ship date. XREAL's word is still "before the holidays."

Jordan ran a number I would not have thought to run. XREAL says AURA passed 10,000 reservations in August, so if every one of those people bought Hyper Visor on day one, the gross is $19,900 before Google takes its cut. I have played Job Simulator, which sits on that same Google Play shelf at $19.99, ten times the price for a game that turned ten this year. A Google-owned studio can price a launch like a demo reel. A small studio copying that number would be making a mistake.

Andrew Eiche, Owlchemy's chief executive, says in the release that AURA "is essentially a pair of shades," the same pitch as the cafe test I failed outright last week. I have still never worn a headset or display glasses in public. Hyper Visor will not change that, since you play it facing a wall in your own house. Maybe that is the idea.

XREAL's other glasses news was quieter. Jordan read the 1 Pro+ spec sheet on Monday and found the headline change was peak brightness, up to 1,200 nits, plus a new nose pad. Same $599. Same 57 degree view. Same X1 chip, and nothing for a developer to port.

A law and a movie star

Victoria's education minister signed Ministerial Order No. 1515 on October 18. From January 28, 2027, students at every school in the state, government, Catholic and independent, have to keep smart glasses switched off and stored during school hours, under the same rule the order sets for phones. Sam read the definition, which is a single sentence: "a device that is designed to be worn as spectacles and has the capability to send, receive, store, record or process digital information." It never mentions a camera. Taken as written, that catches audio glasses with no camera at all and a hearing aid built into a pair of frames, and the way back is a disability exemption that only applies when no other device would do the job. In government schools the ban covers adults as well, at everything from camps to school council meetings.

Snap made Robert Downey Jr. honorary Chief Customer Experience Officer of SPECS on Tuesday, and an original episode airs during Game 1 of the World Series tonight. Sam's piece today is about what the announcement left out. SPECS is still $2,195, and Snap still says shipping starts later this fall in the US, the UK and France, the same window it gave when preorders opened at AWE in June. Iron Man, a World Series slot, and no day. I would swap the commercial for a date.

What to play before Monday

PAYDAY: Aces High launches November 5 at $24.99 on Quest, SteamVR and Steam Frame, and its final playtest is open to anybody through Monday. On Steam it is the Next Fest demo, two heists, the Flowtrust Bank and the Cosmopolitan Museum of Art. On Quest 3 and 3S it is a separate playtest build, and the store page has the steps to join. Everyone who plays gets a Kitty Mask in the full game. I would start with the museum, mostly to find out whether a bag of loot feels heavy in your hands.

Steam Next Fest closes Monday too. UploadVR counted more than 40 PC VR demos in it, and that list is a better use of a weekend than most.

There is nothing to download yet for the Gears of War: E-Day VR mod I wrote up on Wednesday. A modder who goes by rockonthehill posted a trailer on October 18 covering the whole campaign in PC VR, with a chainsaw you start by pulling a lever and a Gnasher you load shell by shell, and he says it will be free. Until he posts a link himself, any site offering an installer is lying to you.

If you have a Quest 3 or 3S, Real VR Fishing will now flood your living room floor and leave the TV on the wall alone. Jordan explained the room scan behind it and why it has not left the Quest. With Game 1 on tonight, the timing is pretty good. And VRChat now supports face tracking natively in its open beta, UploadVR reported today, so avatar creators can set it up in the Avatars SDK instead of bolting it on with add-ons.

Apps that share the room

Nina's two pieces this week came at one question from opposite ends: how does an app share the space with other apps? OpenXR's new spatial containers let an immersive app run inside a bounded box next to other apps instead of taking over the whole view. The spec went into OpenXR 1.1.63 on September 1, sample code followed on October 16, and Godot has it merged for 4.8. No headset you can buy runs it yet. The next day she went through Meta's Layout SDK, which gives an ordinary Android app up to two extra floating panels on a Quest running v207 and folds them back into one window on a phone. Its sibling, the Gaze SDK, comes with a sentence in Meta's own docs worth reading twice: apps "submitted to the Meta Horizon Store with the SDK bundled will be rejected."

The filings

Virtuix is now an official Meta reseller, bundling its Omni One for Quest treadmill with a Quest 3 or 3S, and it says orders are up about 3X. Sam put that next to the company's June-quarter 10-Q: sales down 26 percent to $767,300, a net loss of $7.17 million for the three months, and a going concern warning. The bundle saves you 99 cents over buying the headset from Meta. The next quarterly report is due November 16, and that is where the 3X either shows up or does not.

Sandbox VR says its first New York venue, at 777 Seventh Avenue, is location number 100. Its press release put the opening at today. The venue's own page still said "Opens October 30!" this morning. Sam found the more interesting number further down the release anyway: Deadwood, the zombie series Sandbox VR built itself, has sold more than 2.66 million tickets, out of a company total above 6 million.

Next week

Monday is the last day for the PAYDAY playtest and Next Fest. Sandbox VR's page says Times Square opens Friday. Halloween is the day after.

Forty-one days left to move a Supernatural history. Fifty-six until Zenith goes dark. My Index has no countdown on it at all, and after this week that is about the nicest thing I can say about a piece of hardware.