There still might be hope for Minecraft VR on Oculus Quest
John Carmack had it running on the Oculus Quest at one point, so what's the hold-up?
What you need to know
- Consulting CTO of Oculus, John Carmack, had Minecraft VR running on the Oculus Quest.
- Carmack attributes the lack of an official release to the inability to align dev team schedules.
- Minecraft VR can be played officially on the Oculus Rift platform, including all the latest updates like The Nether Update.
While Minecraft has been available on the Oculus Rift platform since August 2016, it has yet to make an appearance on other major VR platforms like the Oculus Quest. Since the Quest's debut over a year ago, many users have been asking about the possibility of seeing Minecraft VR on the Oculus Quest, but Facebook, Microsoft, and Mojang have been surprisingly silent on the matter. Industry veteran and Consulting CTO of Oculus, John Carmack, says he had Minecraft running on the Quest at one point but was unable to get the production team's schedules aligned to get the project officially delivered onto the Quest platform.
While the statement from Carmack (below) seems a bit on the politically correct side of things, many have taken it to mean that Microsoft hasn't seen much of a reason to invest in VR, regardless of the market realities. On the Xbox side of things, Microsoft has said it's not interested in bringing VR to its next-generation Xbox Series X and, by proxy, it makes sense that it wouldn't invest money into its development teams to create VR versions of any of its other properties either.
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.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) June 25, 2020
There's no arguing that the Minecraft team has been busy lately. Whether we're talking about the latest content additions to Minecraft, like The Nether Update, or even the charming action-RPG spin-off called Minecraft Dungeons, there's been no shortage of work for Minecraft developers. But some similar titles do already exist on the Oculus Quest, like Voxel Works, which made it to our list of best hand-tracking experiences on the Oculus Quest.
There's really no telling what kind of future Minecraft VR might have for other platforms, but the current reality is likely wound more tightly into internal politics than lack of interest or capability of the Quest platform. Minecraft can be played on the GearVR, which utilizes a similar Oculus platform to what's found on the Oculus Quest. It's also not available on the Oculus Go, which is the successor to the GearVR in every way (although the platform has recently been discontinued). On the bright side, you can play Minecraft on your Oculus Quest right now if you hook it up to your PC, so while it's not wireless, it is still Minecraft in VR!
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