Early last year VRFocus first reported on Convrge, a new virtual reality (VR) social network for the Oculus Rift that allowed people to meet up online as avatars and chat together. It quickly became known for hosting events such as dance offs. The software continued to grow throughout 2015, hosting livestreams of events such as Oculus VR’s pre-E3 2015 press conference and adding new areas. Today, however, it’s sadly been announced that the developer of the project have decided to halt work on it for a variety of reasons.
Developers Shawn Whiting and Hayden Lee explained their decision over on Reddit. “The reasons are many; some of them personal, some financial, and some professional,” they said. “We’re going to keep the servers running for as long as we can and we’re looking into open sourcing the parts of Convrge that we think would be useful to the community.
“The reddit community has been incredibly good to us over the course of our journey building Convrge and we want to thank you all for your amazing support. The people we’ve met here and inside Convrge have resulted in friends for life. More than ever we’re convinced that social VR is a powerful force for good, and we look forward to progressing that cause as we move beyond this project.
“Rather than make this a much longer note we would prefer to engage in a dialogue with everyone here who has questions or comments. Please let us know your thoughts and think of this as a transition and not an ending. We’re both still very engaged in the VR community and are looking forward to whatever comes next.”
Replying to comments from the community, Lee noted that they didn’t regret what they’d accomplished over the past year: “Our time wasn’t spent in vein,” he said. “We’ve learned an unimaginable amount about VR, startups and working as a small team, along with meeting a bunch of awesome people in the VR world. I think now is still a great time for indie VR devs and hopefully will be for many years to come. The benefits aren’t always monetary but they are absolutely worth it.”
As for what comes next for the Convrge team? Fans will have to wait and see. VRFocus will continue to follow the VR industry closely, reporting back with the latest on it.
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