Vreal

» see vreal.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Twitch solved streaming by pointing a camera at a screen. Vreal, founded in Seattle in 2015 by Todd Hooper, started from the observation that this is a terrible way to watch a virtual reality game, because the thing that makes VR worth anything is that you can turn your head and the broadcaster has already decided where you are looking. So Vreal did not stream video. It streamed the scene.

A viewer joined the stream inside the same 3D world the player was in, as an avatar, free to walk around them while they played. You could stand behind the player's shoulder or wander off entirely and study the level architecture while the commentary carried on without you. Other viewers were in there too, visible, which made the audience part of the room rather than a column of text down one side.

Investors liked it enough to put in $11.7 million in February 2018, from a group that included Intel Capital and Upfront Ventures, by which point the company was around two dozen people. Eighteen months later it was finished. The closing statement said the team members were moving on to other opportunities and that the Discord would stay open for a week or so, which it did.

~ the case file ~

~ why nobody came ~

The arithmetic was brutal and it was visible from the start. Streaming is a numbers business: a handful of broadcasters against an audience orders of magnitude larger, and the audience has to be free to show up on a whim. Vreal required every single one of those viewers to already own a headset, strap it on, and keep it on for the length of a stream. The number of people who owned VR hardware in 2018 was small, and the fraction of those who wanted to spend their headset time watching rather than playing was smaller still.

Anyone could have done that sum, and plenty of people did, out loud, in 2016. The company's answer was that headsets were about to be everywhere. They were not. Vreal built the right product for a market that arrived late enough to be somebody else's.

~ leaning over the chair ~

I have never owned a VR headset, which is most of the honest review anybody can give this: the product required a purchase I did not make, and so did its audience. Watching other people play is not foreign to me at all. I did it constantly in internet cafes in Ankara around 2003, standing behind somebody's chair while they finished a Counter-Strike round, and the entire reason that worked is that leaning over cost nothing. Vreal's version of leaning over cost four hundred dollars and a cable to a gaming PC.

~ the page that is still up ~

vreal.net answers today. It is a single page, under two kilobytes, with the cyan goggles logo at the top and one line underneath: "Former home of Vreal 2015-2019. Thanks for the memories!" Somebody is still paying for the domain and the hosting seven years on in order to say that.

Most dead startups leave a parking page or a 404. This one left a sentence and a date range, written by whoever had the password last, and it is the only primary source left of a company that raised eleven million dollars.

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