Mojang’s big Minecraft VR mistake
This week, Mojang officially cut VR support from the Bedrock version of Minecraft on PCs. Mojang originally launched VR support for Minecraft Bedrock on the Samsung Gear VR back in April 2016, porting the experience over to the PC version that August. PSVR support was added in 2020, but things went downhill from there.
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While there was a way to play the old Gear VR version on the Oculus Go and the original Oculus Quest, the Oculus Quest 2 ended support for these older games, making it impossible to play. As Mojang slowly pulled the plug on Minecraft VR as an officially supported concept, modders took up the mantle the company failed to uphold.
Vivecraft is by far the most successful Minecraft VR mod. It adds VR support to Minecraft Java, including made-for-VR mechanics that Mojang never bothered to add to the Bedrock version. QuestCraft, a port of Vivecraft made to run natively on Meta Quest headsets, debuted in February 2022 and was a gem until the v71 Meta Quest update broke the game in December 2024.
The only official reason Mojang has given for ending VR support is a cop-out, at best. “Our ability to support VR/MR devices has come to an end,” says Mojang’s Jay Wells in an October 2024 update changelog, making it sound like Mojang doesn’t have enough funds or resources to get the job done. But nothing could be further from the truth, and the rest of the politics of Meta and Microsoft’s recent work further muddle an already confounding decision.
Let’s so some quick math
Since Microsoft seems allergic to giving official player counts for anything these days, I have to estimate things based on other factors. We know that Minecraft sold more than 300 million copies as of October 2023, and statistics firms like DemandSage estimate that Minecraft sees over 55 million daily active players. Only games like Fortnite can match those numbers, again according to statistics groups.
Mojang employs over 600 people, and recent successes like the Minecraft Movie further add to the hundreds of millions of dollars Minecraft makes for Microsoft every year.
So, how in the world can a studio that’s this massive, with this much funding and annual revenue, confidently proclaim that its “ability to support VR/MR devices has come to an end?” None of it makes any sense, and no one seems to know why.
QuestCraft, the only native Quest port of Minecraft, is run by four individuals in their spare time. Surely Mojang could match this effort.
The best answer I could gather is that the number of VR players would be “a drop in the bucket” compared to the number of Minecraft players worldwide. That may be true, but it wouldn’t take very many staff members to properly support a Minecraft VR on the world’s most popular VR platform, Meta Quest. QuestCraft, the only native Quest port of Minecraft, is run by four individuals in their spare time. Surely Mojang could match this effort.
The Meta Quest’s demographics have been shifting younger and younger over the years, with free-to-play content ruling the roost for revenue and player count on the platform every month. Unironically, this exact demographic is the one that would put the most time into Minecraft if it were officially launched as a Meta Quest game.
Back in 2020, then Oculus CTO John Carmack famously got Minecraft running on the Quest “with full positional tracking,” something Mojang already had working just fine on the PC side of things. For some untold reason, this version of the game was never officially picked up by Mojang.
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All of this becomes more confusing when you consider Meta and Microsoft’s other VR partnerships over the past year. You can play Xbox Game Pass games on Quest, Windows 11 has an official linking app so you can use your PC on a Quest, and even Microsoft Office has official Meta Quest apps. Oh, and don’t forget that we’re still due for the Xbox-branded Meta Quest headset that was announced last April.
Meta claims to have attempted to work with Microsoft on getting an official port even as recently as August 2024, but, strangely, hasn’t seemed to be able to make any progress.
If I were being overly optimistic, I’d say that Mojang killed the PC VR version of Minecraft Bedrock in favor of launching a native Quest version later this year. I’d probably lose money if I bet on that, but there’s a very real expectation that these third-party Meta Horizon OS-powered headsets should be launching later this year to compete with the official release of Android XR, and this would tie in perfectly with those announcements.
Everyone loses when Mojang decides that Minecraft players don’t want VR support, and it’s ridiculous that Microsoft and Mojang don’t see that.
No matter the reason, Mojang is leaving money on the table by not supporting a native Meta Quest Minecraft VR. The official QuestCraft Discord server has 80,000 users with dozens of new ones joining every day. That’s for a mod of a game that requires you to sign up for a developer account and then sideload it onto your Quest just to play. Oh, plus, you need to own Minecraft Java, not Bedrock, for it to work.
Imagine, then, how many more players would be on Minecraft VR if there were an official Bedrock version of the game? It’s not hard to expect that number to be in the hundreds of thousands or even over a million active players, as the most popular Quest games have.
That’s players buying stuff on the Marketplace, people subscribing to Realms so they can more easily play with friends on their own time, and players making even more content for their YouTube channels. Everyone loses when Mojang decides that Minecraft players don’t want VR support, and it’s ridiculous that Microsoft and Mojang don’t see that.
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