Oculus Venues

» see oculus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Opening night was 30 May 2018, 7:30 in the evening Pacific time, Vance Joy playing Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. You watched it from a $199 Oculus Go with a seat number in a virtual stand, surrounded by avatars of several thousand strangers watching the same set on the same evening. Announced four weeks earlier at F8, it shipped labeled as a beta and never really stopped being one.

The pitch was narrow and clear. Oculus already had plenty of ways to watch video alone in a headset, which is a solitary experience that nobody needed a social platform for. Venues was the argument that the crowd is the product: that the reason people go to stadiums and cinemas instead of staying home is partly the thing on stage and partly everyone else in the room reacting to it. So Venues ran to a schedule, with a start time and no pause button, and it seated you among strangers rather than alone.

The content came through partnerships rather than production. NextVR supplied the live sport, holding rights with the NBA and the NFL, and ran Major League Baseball games through the first summer. AEG Presents brought the concerts and Lionsgate put feature films in. For a 2018 standalone headset with no PC behind it, that was a stacked schedule.

~ the case file ~

~ the room full of strangers ~

What people remember about Venues is the crowd behaving like a crowd. Avatars had voices and were sitting close enough to be heard, so the room filled with heckling and with the usual problems that arrive whenever a platform puts unmoderated strangers within earshot of each other. Meta spent real effort on reporting and muting tools over the four years, which is the honest measure of how much of it there was.

The Go never went through official Turkish retail, the platform required a Facebook account for most of this period, and the schedule was built around American sport that means very little in Ankara. I was thirty four in 2018, and the closest I came to any of it was reading about the Foo Fighters set they ran after a Super Bowl broadcast that had gone badly.

~ three names in four years ~

It launched as Oculus Venues. In October 2021, when Facebook became Meta and the Oculus brand began being stripped out of everything, it became Horizon Venues. Then on 6 June 2022 the standalone app was discontinued and the events moved inside Horizon Worlds, where the name shortened again to plain Venues and the thing became a category rather than a destination.

Meta never gave a reason, and framed the whole thing as a gain: you could now move from a game world to a hangout space and then into a show without leaving. That was true, and it also meant the app with the seat numbers and the start times was gone. This is not a shutdown in the usual sense, it is a product being digested by a larger one, which leaves no farewell page and no date for anyone to point at later.

~ what absorption leaves ~

Almost nothing, archivally. A service that dies gets a notice and a last capture, sometimes a goodbye post that sits there for a decade. A service that gets folded in gets a changelog entry and a redirect, and four years of scheduled events and heckling end up as a feature bullet inside something else. Horizon Worlds itself is now winding down on Quest, which means the place Venues was absorbed into is going the same way.

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