Anton Hand is an indie VR developer with RUST LTD, who is the project lead for Hotdogs, Horseshoes, & Hand Grenades. Hand made the decision sometime in 2016 to not explicitly support any Facebook APIs or hardware for his indie VR project beyond what is afforded within the cross-platform Steam VR APIs.
He’s also taken a lot of public positions against Facebook over the years, which has meant that a number of disgruntled developers have shared with him some of their more negative experiences with dealing with Facebook developer relations. He says that it’s been a bit of an open secret within the VR development community that many people have had bad experiences with Facebook’s developer relations, and he shares some of his own personal experiences and generalizes some anecdotes of what ends up being a lot of one-way communication with Facebook. Some more specific grieviences were aired over the past couple of days by BigScreen developer Darshan Shankar and former AltSpaceVR developer Greg Fodor
We talk about the sad state of developer relationship withing the broader XR ecosystem as detailed in his Twitter thread:
Don't think people realize how much harder it is to stay afloat in VR without dealing with FB. There is no second party that actually 'gives a shit' in some substantive way.
— Anton "Jetlagged" Hand (@AntonHand) August 18, 2020
I feel like Hand and I are temperamentally on opposites sides of the spectrum between pessimism vs optimism and realism vs idealism, and the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Or perhaps that’s my optimistic idealism hoping for the best possible outcome beyond what Hand describes as the VR community helping to “build a hellish corpo-panopticon.”
Either way, Hand choice to not to do business with Facebook in any fashion has given him the freedom to speak about a lot of topics that other VR developers avoid discussing on the record. If there are deeper patterns of bad behavior from Facebook relative to independent developers, then it’s worth overcoming some of the chilling effects and speaking out and I’m happy to listen to other experiences that folks would like to share with the larger community.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
Here are some other comments from VR developers about Facebook’s behaviors that have come up in the past couple of days:
Let's talk about how Facebook is screwing us in VR.
A major use case of @BigscreenVR is like the "iTunes of VR": we offer 3D movie rentals for $4.99.
— Darshan Shankar (@DShankar) August 18, 2020
When AltspaceVR was in trouble they pretended like they were going to buy us to come build Venues, did the whole dance, and then in the last minute backed out and said to leadership they were looking forward to hiring us. Ruthless, basically.
— gfodor.id (@gfodor) August 18, 2020
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So the announcement from Facebook on August 18th that they were going to be getting rid of all the Oculus accounts and consolidating all identity into Facebook's identity, and that eventually all of the data management would be happening by Facebook, meaning that for anybody that's still using existing VR hardware, that they will be able to use the Oculus ID until 2023, but that starting in October 2020, any new users, any new hardware has to use a Facebook identity. So this was not necessarily a popular decision. In fact, there was a lot of controversy and a lot of discussion of folks that were quite upset about it. One thing that I would say right off the top is that using Facebook's identity means that you have to assign Facebook's terms of service and Facebook's privacy policy, which gives a lot more latitude for doing all sorts of data surveillance on you and working with third party data brokers, being able to track what you're buying outside of Facebook and to be able to track through Facebook pixels, all these different websites that you're visiting, it implies that there's just going to be a whole bunch of surveillance that's integrated into virtual reality, which I don't think a lot of people were all that excited about. But it created a larger resistance and cultural context under which that there were some people that may have previously not aired some of their grievances with Facebook started to come forward and talk about specific stories and anecdotes that they had in the past. Greg Fodor is somebody who worked at Altspace, and on August 18th, he says, when Altspace VR was in trouble, they pretended like they were going to buy us, meaning Facebook was going to come and buy Altspace, and to come build venues. They did a whole dance, and then in the last minute, backed out and said to the leadership of Altspace that they were looking forward to hiring us. Ruthless, basically. And it's from that thread that then Darshan Shankar from BigScreenVR came forward and saying that he was facing similar kind of issues in the sense that he was doing BigScreenVR. He's selling movies. The companies are already taking anywhere between 60, 80%. And then on top of all that, all transactions that happened was on the Facebook platform. Oculus is taking an additional 30% on top of that. So he's actually losing money for each sale that he makes. and that when you try to make a deal, it's just not up for negotiation. That's perfectly up within the rights of Facebook to be able to do that in their terms of service, but I think the issue here is that Facebook has competing products where it's in their interest to be able to kind of squash any independent developer who may be perceived as creating a service that may be competing with some of the interests that they want to do. And so I think a lot of the different stories that were coming out were related to that, but also there just seemed to be a pattern of having bad developer relations with the broader independent virtual reality community over the last six years. So lots of different grievances over that time. So Anton Hand is somebody who is a developer who works on hot dogs, horseshoes, and hand grenades. It's not sold on Oculus Home or any Oculus platforms. It's sold through SteamVR, and he's taken a very vocal stance as to never wanting to support Facebook hardware or to deliver his software through any Facebook platform. So he's taken a very public stance to speak out against Facebook. And he's been doing this for a long time, which has meant that any developer who's had any grievance has often gone to him and shared different experiences that they've had with Facebook. So I had a chance to talk to Anton because I wanted to hear a little bit more of his story, his context, and why he's not working with Facebook. And also just to get some sense of this larger grievance of some of the potential patterns of mistreatment when it comes to Facebook and the broader virtual reality ecosystem and their developer community. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Anton happened on Wednesday, August 19th, 2020. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:48.001] Anton Hand: My name is Anton Hand. I'm a member of Rust Limited, and I'm the project lead on a game called Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades.
[00:03:57.773] Kent Bye: Great. So I had a chance to do some of the demos of H3 back at GDC a couple of years ago. And what's been happening with H3? I know, has there been an official release yet or is still an early release?
[00:04:09.440] Anton Hand: We're in perpetual early access, which is a fun, you know, I sort of joke that H3 is sort of like, we're the only live service game dumb enough to only charge people once. Just in the fact that like H3 is sort of this like living ongoing project. that is centered around these sort of like weekly or bi-weekly content drops of various kinds, experiments, tons of interaction with the community. And with no real end in sight, you know, we're up to, I believe the last, yeah, our last update was update 93, just to give you an idea of just exactly how large a sunk cost fallacy can look. Just kidding. I absolutely adore it. Perhaps a little too much because obviously we're going on. It's going to be, it's like four and a half years in at this point.
[00:05:04.222] Kent Bye: Wow. So yeah, I mean, there's a lot of that's been happening in the, in the wider VR industry. And you know, there's a news yesterday with Facebook announcing that they were going to be requiring Facebook logins and maybe having been in the industry here for five years, maybe even longer since the early days of the DK one, like what's your sense of where you're at relative to the larger VR industry?
[00:05:27.527] Anton Hand: I mean, relative to the larger VR industry, I think where I diverge from a majority of the people who have found some sort of success in the field is that I have not jumped along with everyone over into the sort of standalone VR quest ecosystem for a host of reasons. So I'm one of maybe you could say I'm one of the cranky olds that is just like, I'm fine, just doing my thing over here and being PC VR with the same title that I started working on back in 2016.
[00:06:04.885] Kent Bye: So when, when did that happen for you? When did you decide that you were not going to be, because you're, you're on Steam VR and you're using the Steam APIs, which gives access for people who have Oculus products to be able to have access to your game, but you're not necessarily explicitly supporting anything from Oculus. When did you make that decision that you weren't going to be doing direct business with Oculus at all?
[00:06:30.035] Anton Hand: I don't know if I can pinpoint a exact moment. that it happened. It was more of like a series. There was a long nebulous period where I was sort of on the fence. You know, it was for strictly development reasons, because the game has always been about sort of really, really agile, rapid update cadences. It has never made sense from a purely like practical standpoint to say support an entire second set of APIs, because then you have to manage two builds. It raises the cost of doing business. for each one of those unique costs, you know, content updates. So for the longest time, there was always this practical reason. And I was sort of kicked the decision down the road about whether there would eventually be a point where the content of the game solidified such that it would make sense to do the necessary re-engineering to support Oculus' APIs natively and put the game on their store and things like that. And obviously there were there also just the tertiary issues of even just evaluating whether that made sense from a financial standpoint, which is a super mixed proposition based upon who you talk to. But I think it was around really it was a lot of the 2016 election was when I went from like in my head, it transitioned from, oh, this is just an incompetent ads, social media company that writes bad software. to, oh, this might be one of the more harmful entities on the planet, and I don't want to do business with them, was the transition that occurred around that time. And has just continued to deepen with every news story about them for four years straight.
[00:08:19.173] Kent Bye: I think that anybody that's in the VR industry, they have to confront this paradox or this dilemma and find their own moral intuitions and how they guide, because there's a bit of a utilitarian argument that a lot of people could make, which is that the amount of good that VR could bring to the world is worth dealing with a company that may have some compromises when it comes to their ethics and their morals. Also, VR is such a new and nascent medium that maybe we're able to do something that's completely new and different than all of the other things that they've done before when it comes to the scale that they've reached with billions of people on their social network. And yesterday, part of the, I guess, emerging frustrations was that having Oculus as a separate brand, they were originally Oculus VR LLC on September 4th, 2018, that became Facebook Technologies. And then in an announcement that was made yesterday, but was pulled the last second, but it's going to be made official in October, Facebook Technologies is now going to be Facebook Inc. There's going to be literally no differentiation at all, any sort of subsidiary, all the data management. is going to be taken care of by Facebook. So I think that people that maybe had a sense of psychological distance when it came to Oculus being separate than what Facebook was doing. Now, I think with this news yesterday, there is like this uproar of people that I think have these deeper existential concerns of like, okay, well, how differentiated is this going to be? Is Facebook really cutting down the price and subsidizing the future of VR by this business model of surveillance capitalism? Is that what is going to be driving the future of VR? And I think that's the deeper concerns that at least I saw. Maybe I'm projecting my own story onto that. But yeah, I'm not sure if you saw something similar or, you know, if you've been on that, on that train for a while.
[00:10:10.693] Anton Hand: I mean, I've been on that train for years, you know, very, very vocally about it. I think what it's difficult to tease apart, because I think there are a multiplicity of perspectives, even in terms of looking at people who are reacting negatively. You know, there is a percentage of folks who sort of knew this was always going to be the case. It was only a matter of time and are just expressing their displeasure now that it is finally that time. there's a group of folks who I guess were in a deeper stage of denial that assumed that there would remain some sort of insulation between the entities, both just because that is how some megacorps, you know, roll, but also because of the fact that that was sold very, very, very aggressively to people at the initiation of consumer VR. I mean, you have the comments that Palmer made on Reddit last night and they're like, yeah, everyone who downvoted me back then, guess they knew better. Like, yeah, duh. And then there are, there are a percentage, I deal with this all the time with young users. Cause I, especially with the proliferation of VR gaming and sort of like more poppy genres of it. Anytime we're talking about VR, we do have to talk about the fact that a huge percentage of the audience, and a growing part as it becomes cheaper, is young. Like, the percentage of H3's users that are in the 14 to 18 age bracket this year is dramatically larger than the first year of the game. Like, the mean age has shifted downward, the median age has shifted downward, and a lot of that's cost, and a lot of that's interest, and a lot of it's easier to get up and running without technical assistance from someone hyperliterate. But what it means is that that age group is even more oblivious as to, like, what they're even buying. So like if you were looking at the responses and even me dealing with my community, the percentage of young users that were not even aware that they had a Facebook device, that they might've been ambiently aware there was some relationship of Oculus, which they thought of as a company to Facebook. They didn't realize that they were functionally just buying Facebook hardware sort of thing. And that's something that frankly put a chunk of the early adopter community, especially in the early days, worked very hard to, if not obfuscate, then shout down anyone who voiced those concerns, especially on our Oculus. You know, one of the people who did that works at a certain VR publication currently.
[00:12:58.919] Kent Bye: So, going back to this Facebook being in charge and pushing forward VR, I think part of my frustration in covering this is that I've often run into people who are developers who are frustrated to some extent, but they don't feel like they have the freedom to be able to speak openly about their frustrations. I remember when the room scale was announced at one of the Oculus Connects, I think it was Oculus Connect 3, and adding a whole new camera. And they hadn't told any of the developers about this. And anybody that was doing a room scale experience had to then now all of a sudden have all this extra work of supporting a third camera, which wasn't even fully baked. It's almost like a PR decision to put out there and to compete with the HTC Vive room scale, but yet it wasn't fully fleshed out. The people who were actually in charge of implementing in it, they were just kind of thrown upon them. there was just a breakdown of communication and a lot of the emotional labor of making something that was half-baked worked. The developers were dealing with that. And so I see that there's so many different ways in which Oculus has not been in good open communication with developers, but also kind of true to the fact that they were such a big player in a way that they're really kind of pushing people around. And I think that in the last couple of days, we're starting to see more people. Darshan from Big Screen had a whole thread where he was saying that Facebook is creating a competing product and, you know, basically these monopolistic behaviors that are trying to undercut competition on the app store and really just trying to own and dominate the entire space. And any developer that was doing a product that could be seen as competing with some of the interests of Facebook were either not supported or actively threatened or, you know, just not really treated well. That's just a few anecdotes that I've seen in the last couple of days, but Since you've been so vocal in your opposition to Facebook, I'm just curious if there's any other larger themes or anecdotes that you have in terms of what you've heard from the larger developer community.
[00:14:54.965] Anton Hand: I mean, part of it, and this is it's difficult to peel things back into sort of a couple different segments. I think when we talk about like developers dealing with Facebook, one of my great frustrations with other developers has been the fact that it's been a within a very small community, an open secret, exactly how poor Facebook's treatment of roughly the entire developer community is and has been seemingly from the beginning. It's not to say that every single person who's worked in Oculus, who's had developer facing things have been bad. A number of them that I've even met have been wonderful folk. Just to clarify, but the number of instances that I've heard from fellow developers of people just being screamed at or being bald-faced lied to, like not just like little white lies, but straight up gaslit as to the circumstances of things surrounding launches, surrounding pricing, surrounding what other people are doing to try to manipulate their developer community, not unlike the way you would expect someone in like the mob to act, has always left me really aghast. Aghast both that it occurs, but also aghast that everyone just sort of rolls over and takes it. It's supremely frustrating and demoralizing to me that the people who I really respect and know and sort of like respect to treat the people they work with and work under them, at the same time, turn around and sort of tolerate the macro condition under which they work with Facebook. So and I know that's a lot of that is phrased very broadly because I have to state things pretty carefully. But yeah, and I think how to put it from my own personal experience, I think a good chunk of the culture is the way it is because they were pretty rotten, like they were liars from the start. like that was their culture. Like there's an individual who's still with them now who is part of the pre-acquisition group who was fantastic at smiling and lying right to your face, which he did on several occasions to us in those early days. And so, yeah, I think a culture that's rotten at the top is going to just rot downward. I don't think they'll ever change. And I don't think them growing will improve that situation at all. And so I made the fairly early decision of like, I'm not going to just make my life actively worse. I don't wish to be beholden to them at all. I don't want them to have any sort of agency over my life. What the fuck is the point of being an indie, being independent if you just have to tolerate serial abuse from another entity as a matter of course to do business. I don't see the point.
[00:18:08.962] Kent Bye: Yeah, the challenge of covering this space is both like this journalist and oral historian, I sort of mix between the both as just depending on when I air things, it's difficult to, I guess, independently verify what's actually happening when it comes to these developer relations. the challenge I felt trying to cover this space is that there's all these non-disclosure agreements that a lot of the developers are mandated to be able to sign, meaning that they literally can't talk about any of these things. And anything that they have told me is sort of like they're violating the NDA, but yet I can't independently verify it. It's like it becomes this level of hearsay. Even some of the stuff that you just told me is a level of hearsay that it's hard to sort of independently verify. In your own experiences, as much as I trust. It's like, okay, like, as a journalist, I think it's worth bringing to light. If there are these systemic issues that are happening, then it's worth talking about. But yet, if they're sort of enclosed within this proprietary corporate NDA, I feel like there's a part of this whole dynamic where the NDAs have been used to potentially silence any dissent or any independent voices. And I understand that there's a valid use for the NDAs. But I think at the same time, It's an area that makes it just difficult to have any sort of checks and balances on.
[00:19:21.408] Anton Hand: I also I think perhaps there is a slight over fixation here in the way that you frame this on the non-disclosure agreement because of the word agreement being present even in here. Like this is about fundamentally a gross power asymmetry that goes beyond like even if no NDA existed. If you're a developer working in XR and Facebook decided that they wanted to destroy you, they just could. Like, it doesn't matter whether you violated some terms of the specific way in which an NDA has been phrased. Like, that's where the people don't live in fear of NDAs. People live in fear of sociopaths in big tech corporations who are vindictive. and who want to either ruin you, once again, vindictively, or just because it's part of their core ideology. Like the stuff that Darshan brought up, the fact that someone thought that it was a socially acceptable thing to be like, you might as well just come work for us, because we're going to do the same thing as you, and we're going to destroy you when we do that. Like, that wasn't metaphor there. Like, that's me like, no, we're going to obliterate your ability to feed yourself. if you continue trying to do this. That's a threat of actual violence that we have normalized as a matter of course in business writ large, but especially in like VC run big tech business. And it's disgusting. And whoever said that to him is actually like mentally damaged. And as far as I'm concerned, kind of a monster. So And this is the environment that everyone has to exist in. And you either harden up to take it, and you just take the abuse of being in that ecosystem, or you're someone like me who's like, I have nothing to lose, fuck you all, sort of thing, and just refuse to participate in most of it, knowing full well that there are major opportunities that I just don't have access to, or I'm not going to pursue, because I refuse to play that game.
[00:21:40.493] Kent Bye: So you had did a whole Twitter thread where you had said that because your choice to not work with Facebook and Oculus, that you've put yourself at a certain disadvantage when it comes to getting support from the larger XR industry. And you kind of walk through. what kind of support you get from all the other major players, whether it's Valve or HTC or Sony or Microsoft. Maybe you could do a quick recap of what is the state of getting support as any developer from some of these large companies that have really invested billions of dollars into the technology. But yet it seems like when it comes to interacting with the community and in the trenches that they're kind of checked out and not really engaged.
[00:22:20.493] Anton Hand: Yeah. I mean, this is once again, this is the joys of being this particular sort of independent is that I'm willing to speak this candidly and rudely about this, but I do so largely as a reality check to young developers so that they know what they might be getting into, which is really that like Valve's, I can't help but feel with all the experience I've had that Valve's engagement in VR might change on an hourly basis with the mood of a very small number of people at Valve. You know, it's like anything they do. There's no particular deadline. There's no particular like we're going to they have no market pressure to do X by Y date in this sort of immutable thing. And the reality is that because people have bills to pay, that that doesn't gel with the needs of most developers. And because of the fact that the particular sort of, I don't know, even just calling them libertarians is sort of glib and oversimplified. But their market ideology is such that what they clearly do not wish to be is a publisher. And what I think a lot of VR developers desperately wish is that Valve would step up and be a publisher, which is unfortunate because I think they would be a terrible publisher. I don't think the things that they're great at. I mean, the way that they've even structured Steam, like they've said so themselves, that they're like, we don't know what people want. And so we built a structure to help people be able to let other people know what they want. And so that's like almost antithetical to the at least the stated role of like what a publisher is. So, yeah. And so what that means is that like the greatest service that they provide, obviously, is SteamVR. They're the only ones who've bothered to create a practical shim that allows a game to just sort of function everywhere. sort of thing. But obviously it has its problems and they and they're they don't commit to things quite the same way that other tech companies do in terms of like ongoing manpower and such. As for Sony, I mean, Sony, it's you know, the issues with Sony are the same in terms of like Sony to Indies, which is that Sony cares about independent like non AAA developers for one year out of four. And it's the year that they don't have big AAA releases planned in their big eternal fight against Microsoft. So it's three years of fuck off Indies. We don't care. And then, oh, my God, we don't have anything for three quarters. We got to stuff it with something. And suddenly they care about indies and they send a little army of their like US side people out to find people and then drop everyone like a hot potato the moment they're filled back up with AAA stuff. And I put almost everything that is VR in that category. Sure, there's like the Resident Evil game and things like that, but VR is still a side dalliance for them. And that's why I think we still haven't gotten any sort of a... Like they will put off doing another PSVR until the last possible moment. And they'll be like, six months out. Oh shit, we don't have anything for such and such. And then because they have the capability to do this from a hardware standpoint, it'll just materialize. But I don't think anything related to the next rev of PSVR is going to be relevant to anyone for like two years. Like that's not going to pay anyone's bills for you know, some VR dev looking for a thing. So, I mean, as for Microsoft, they're just like completely, I don't know if they do anything exactly. They obviously have their OEMs that, you know, produce HMDs in that ecosystem. The rep I have over at AHP for the G2 is very, very nice, but it's like, That's all it is, is nice. And I'll at least be able to use the headset and implement it for my game before it comes out. But in terms of like that isn't it's not like they're funding content or even seeming to still do any sort of unified developer relations. Honestly, I don't know how they managed to keep tricking OEMs into making more WMR headsets. I think the fact that we haven't seen another one from Samsung yet is telling and Facebook poached Lenovo, at least temporarily. So who knows what that ecosystem is? And then lastly, of course, like HTC is just like a semi-incompetent family business. It's just like, hey guys, what's the next confusing HFT product we can make next? You know, are clearly designed for the consumer space, but no one will pay for it. So we're going to say it's for the enterprise space, even though that doesn't make any sense. And, oh, VR Arcades all just fucking died because of the virus, so I guess we're fucked no matter what. Like, coupled with the fact that the few developers I've talked to who did have some sort of direct relationship with them from, like, getting some funding for a project, all reported to me just being dicked around by them. So, it's one of those, like, I wouldn't suggest anyone actually tried to work with HTC on something. So.
[00:27:43.548] Kent Bye: And we have Google who's pretty much gone AWOL when it comes to VR. And then Apple, they may be working on some AR glasses, maybe VR. We don't know exactly. But do you have any take on Google and Apple, how they fit into this larger picture?
[00:27:58.583] Anton Hand: I mean, like Google has clearly shifted all of their effort from a like games relationship stuff to Stadia. And even though, like, Stadia is the butt of many jokes to many people, I don't think folks realize exactly how large Stadia's build-out is. I know some Google people, and it's quite staggering, actually, the level of hardware commitment they've made. Exactly how much it catches on, I don't know. I don't play, actually, enough games to care in that regards, but if VR becomes an interest space of theirs again, it will stem from what they're doing streaming-wise. And they probably realized that streaming VR from a Google server to your headset, we're not nuts. I mean, the American internet infrastructure is too broken for something like that. As for Apple, I mean, I think it's pretty laughable when people are like, oh, Apple's going to have a Quest competitor. It's like if Apple releases a pair of AR glasses, they're going to be like $1,800 or more. That's not a Quest competitor. Apple will produce a luxury good when they can make it not look dorky. Apple is a luxury goods brand slash bank at this point. Like that's their only growth area at this point is scraping service rent and becoming a finance company. In 10 to 20 years, they'll probably just be a bank.
[00:29:27.208] Kent Bye: So that's a good overview of the ecosystem and Facebook with the Quest standalone. You know, I did an interview with Chris Miranda at AWE, and he was really excited about it. And I hear from folks like Danny Unger of Cloudhead Games, who had a number of different indie games with the gallery, but then has really struck a lot of success when it comes to Pistol Whip. In some ways, he sees that the vertical integration that comes from the Quest has given his indie studio the opportunity to continue to make games and to find some success, and that there's a bit of a lower of a friction, is the way that he talks about it, is that it's like the iPhone in the sense of all this virtually integrated closed-wall garden, but you get rid of a lot of the updates, the friction, the fragmentation of the ecosystem. And so, you know, Neil Trevitt has told me, every successful open standard has a proprietary competitor. And maybe the proprietary competitor always has to come first. So maybe we're in a state where we're creating this kind of closed console, closed garden to really kind of build up the ecosystem, but that the industry needs to prove itself before you have other players that are really willing to kind of dive in and create something that is based upon OpenXR, a little bit more open. But that the fragmentation of the developer ecosystem seems to be that like nobody really knows how to cultivate that Ecosystem and that at this point it seems like the VR market is certainly standalone VR They have HTC as a competitor, but not really viable Competitors or any of the and parity in terms of really matching the quality of the quest so we basically have Facebook that's in a functional monopoly and And what do we do other than just to kind of like surrender to the IOI of virtual reality becoming Facebook without having any sort of other viable market competitor coming in to provide any alternatives?
[00:31:13.612] Anton Hand: Well, I mean, first, just just comment on something earlier on in your statement, which is like the reason that there is no West competitor is that there is no other mega tech corp company that got caught flat footed and was functionally locked out without a platform of their own. Like Facebook has had to exist at every other major tech company's sufferance since its inception. They don't have a phone. They don't have a hardware platform. It's arguable that this is Facebook's last chance to do that. And so I sort of laugh when people talk about like, oh, maybe they'll decide this isn't profitable enough and just abandon VR and stop. And I'm like, and do what exactly? This is their only gambit, their only card to play if they wish to be more than just a data broker. which question mark how long that may even be tolerated societally. Who knows? Lots of things can change. It's never good to just be reliant on one thing. So like I don't, I don't see an open quest competitor or an anything quest competitor arisen cause it's not in anyone's interest to soak the preposterous amount of research money they've probably put into it as well as the per unit cost that they're likely eating for every quest, just to purchase market position. As for like, what are folks to do, I mean, I gave you my answer, the only answer I have is my own, which is like, not interested. You know, I don't really find the device terribly interesting in the first place, just from a personal standpoint, like the type of games that I'm interested in making. But even if I did, it's one of those, it's... I don't care how nice the park is if it's surrounded by landmines. And so obviously that calculus is different for other people and because people tend to roll with the punches as it were with this. We're all complicit in capitalism's evils. Most people just sign and be like, oh, this is how, well, what's the phrase de jure from our current fascist administration? It is what it is. I guess that's what most people will just say. I don't think there really is another alternative with it. It's one of the reasons why, like I think I said to you the other day via text, I've sort of, I came to a realization in the past couple months that I'm no longer really invested emotionally in the future of VR. And there's something sort of weirdly comforting about that, which is that you don't really get disappointed in quite the same way. Like I still love the product I work on. I love the community. that I have. I'll continue working on that game probably as long as people give a shit. But in terms of the sort of larger issues of the medium, I don't really see much of anything to be terribly happy about going forward. And so I've sort of cut that tether in my heart.
[00:34:16.333] Kent Bye: I think anybody that is involved in the medium, they have to, they come to some point where they look at all the possible harms that could be done. Where this all goes, are we turning everything into a dystopic surveillance state where everything we say or do and all of our by measure data, our thoughts are recorded and fed directly into the government with the third party doctrine. There's no fourth amendment protections of all this. It's just one big giant fire hose into what seems to be a snowball into more and more totalitarian companies that are becoming more entrenched in their power and wealth, but also the government itself. Discouraging of democracy. I don't know. I guess that's the thing that freaks me out the most is the potential for biometric data and that it's going to be fed into this giant surveillance machine and then, as a result, fed directly into the government as well.
[00:35:07.333] Anton Hand: operated by a person who is quoted as saying, they trust me, those dumb fucks at the initiation of the enterprise that has reached the stage that it is right now. Like Zucks just sat there and lied right to Congress. He wields a shocking amount of power because I think he still has majority voting shares for Facebook. Like he's one of the more powerful human beings on the planet. He has a pretty wretched ideology, the parts of it that are coherent, at least a whole bunch of his sort of stated ideology in regards to Facebook is just contradictory, which I hope is just because it's naked propaganda. And he's just saying what he is saying is a party line. I hope it's not that he's actually so incompetent that he believes everything that he says, because that would be even scarier in a way. and that this is the individual that we are entrusting all of this to. We are the dumb fucks, trusting him with all of our information and eventually a scan of all of our interior living space and, as you say, all of the biometric information, all to play, as I was saying in my truthhood, for what? To play a bunch of overpriced coin-op arcade games with a really fantastic audiovisual experience. because of the latest tech, you know? When we could just all be outside playing tag, actually, and not helping build a hellish corpo panopticon.
[00:36:44.717] Kent Bye: Well, I imagine that because H3 has enjoyed quite a large audience and success that Facebook or Oculus may have reached out to you at some point, trying to court you into coming over into the Facebook platform. Has you had any interactions like that where they've reached out or have you actually had any meetings or discussions with them at all about any of this?
[00:37:06.344] Anton Hand: The last time that I really had much of any face-to-face contact with them was in the lead up to the quest and at GDC and those meetings were so and they were like largely technically based but were so bizarre that that was around the time where I basically stopped holding my tongue just about them in general very publicly and they have not contacted me since which is fine by me but yeah that was the like Oh, let's see. Am I going to be gaslit in another one of these weird DevRel meetings? Yep, that's exactly what's going to happen here. I'm going to be asked questions and then told why my answer was wrong for like 20 minutes at a time. So that's just who they are. It's the authoritarian character filters all the way down to the way that they handle utterly mundane things. And it's just amusing. I wonder at times if they even realize it themselves.
[00:38:09.952] Kent Bye: Well, I'm in this industry, I've been covering it for the last six years since May of 2014. And I guess when I hear you say that you're no longer emotionally invested in the future of VR, I suppose that I've had that sunk cost of investing so much of my time and energy of documenting this medium. I still actually believe that the medium itself has incredible potential to be one of the most powerful transformative technologies that are out there. I see that it's such a shame that it is tied to a company that has so much baggage when it comes to surveillance capitalism and The antidotes that you're sharing here are, I guess, they're not new in terms of the body of experiences that I've had. It sort of fits into this larger grievances that I think that people have had, which is that they have turned their head their other way because they're the biggest player. They either have NDAs or for reasons that are very pragmatic, they've opted to not take the path that you've taken, which is to burn all the bridges with Facebook, one of the biggest platform holders, and that they've just kind of gone with it. And, you know, in some sense, this shift of the user no longer being managed by Oculus, in some sense, it's cosmetic in the sense that it was already probably on the back end, already completely merged anyway. It's just sort of like a semantic thing or a cosmetic thing, or even if there is a deeper dissolving of Facebook technologies, whatever that means, now being fully owned by Facebook Inc. There's literally no distinction. I think that it has been this explosion of people questioning, okay, is this going to be the thing that actually is the straw that breaks the camel's back? Am I going to actively take as aggressive route as you are taking, which is to refuse to do any business with Facebook and to choose competitors? which if they want to do standalone VR, there's no real viable competitors. And so you're out of luck if that's your path, but that's a pretty hard line to take that I, my fear is that there's not going to be a critical mass of people that are willing to put their entire careers on the line to be able to send this deeper message. And that Facebook's kind of in this position to just kind of do whatever they want. And I mean, this, they just kind of like sent out a press release saying, okay, this is happening. and there's no discussion or dialogue or whether or not this makes sense, or if it makes a better user experience. I mean, this is all to benefit Facebook. And most people really don't want that. And yet, at the end of the day, whatever they say goes, and there's no dialogue and no interaction. And it's almost like being thrown upon us by totalitarian rulers who are not in dialogue with what's happening at the grassroots. And it's a little bit of what I see at least in the last couple of days is like this uprising. But my fear is that it's just a social media outrage that happens over the course of one day when it comes down to at the end of the day, are people going to actually change their behaviors? Are they going to do what you did, which is put some real economic stake of their future on the line to be able to make a larger statement?
[00:41:07.536] Anton Hand: Well, I mean, first off, sort of three separate things. One, this isn't just a cosmetic change. Like Facebook running on your machine, like they're sniffing browser cookies more than pretty much anyone else is. They're tracking you as pervasively as possible, even simply asking you to log into an actual Facebook account if you didn't have one prior. Even if you fill it out entirely with fake information is a deep encroachment unless you run the most preposterously locked down computer imaginable, which no one outside of InfoSec does. So this is a tangible change. It's not just a symbolic one. And I do think it's important to acknowledge that. The second part of things that I was laughing as you're talking about, like it's never been a dialogue. with Facebook. That's what I just said. Even the situations where dealing with anyone else, like when Valve invited folks up to work on the devs to look at the index and look at the index controllers, that was a dialogue. That was a real situation where feedback was given, feedback was acknowledged. It felt respectful. That was integrated back into the core product. Facebook DevRel meetings are the opposite of that. They're like, you have a bunch of questions and things like that. And it was at the end of the day, it was only to make sure you were fully informed of what their party line on any issue of concern was and that the decision had already been made. It was immutable. Your feedback was not actually being solicited. But to their point, does any of this matter? Of course, fucking not. Can't like give me a break like their NFL spend in this next season, assuming not like that that happens because we managed to get through NFL preseason without too many people like anyone with too high of a salary dying sort of thing. Like if that actually happens, just the spend they do for the quest in the NFL season, which is like three ads per game, will offset all of the negative internet sentiment from this sort of thing happening precisely because this is a mass market product. This isn't something that's being aimed at enthusiasts anymore. Each stage of this transition to mobile VR has been bluntly put about Facebook going the enthusiast community that sort of built this medium is no longer relevant to them at all. You know, the Rift S has been in a quasi broken state for as much time as it hasn't been since it was released. And it was released with basically no warning, even to their developer community, probably because it was done at literally the last minute. And so Nike doesn't consult you and I in what we think about a specific shoe that's coming out sort of thing. Like they're building a like, no, we're going to sell 10 million of these. Your opinion is irrelevant. And if, frankly put, if it's successful, then they can functionally become Nintendo in that all of the software that they actually need to produce to make that a successful standalone product, they can produce in-house. So honestly, like if 90% of their developer community revolted against them, who fucking cares? They'd be like, well, I guess we're building more in-house development capacity. And they would just carry on. So this has always been a situation where they were just going to pursue what their objectives were, regardless of any volume or tenor of complaint. And it's enjoyable and cathartic and fuck them. But, you know, they're going to do what they're going to do.
[00:45:02.043] Kent Bye: Well, I wanted to talk just a moment about what's happening between Epic and Apple. I know you've had some opinions and thoughts on that, but I think what I would say is that what's happened with mobile computing and mobile phones has been a dark path of having two major companies dictate what can and cannot exist on their platforms and really a lot of really bad monopolistic practices. And in that sense, I am glad to see that Tim Sweeney and Epic is on this game of chicken. of is Epic going to be willing to throw away not having access to macOS and iOS to make this larger point to potentially, as he claims and says, to make a more welcoming environment for everybody. Now, this could be driven by his own interest of having the Epic store on the platform of Apple. And there may be alternative motives, but of all the different people that are out there right now, I get excited that at least somebody is standing up to Apple, who just today was announced that they have a market cap of $2 trillion. And Epic's not anywhere near that. There are billions of market cap, but at least they have the capability to fight back. And I encourage that because if they're successful, then we might see similar type of opening up of some of the same monopolistic practice that I see Facebook doing, which has tried to eliminate all competition on their platform. So on the whole, I'm happy that it's happening, but I'm just curious if you have any thoughts on that dynamic of using the courts to be able to try to fight against this monopoly entrenchment of the App Store model.
[00:46:34.956] Anton Hand: I mean, I think the moment one is looking to a billionaire owned corporation to save you from the behavior of another corporation, like everything's lost anyway, this is all just a joke. And so I think it's such a lack of imagination and indicative of such the apocalyptic level of, like it should be the state trust busting. It shouldn't be a game company performatively making what is functionally an ad campaign for V-Bucks as the like intro sesh to their performative lawsuit that they're probably gonna lose sort of thing. If that's the best we've got, if that's our best tool here, against monopolistic multinationals. We're fucked, Kent. That's how I feel about it. That doesn't give me any hope. That's disastrous. The only thing that's sadder than it is how many people are placing hope in it and think of it as like, oh, no, this is a mechanism for change that's scalable and the right one's the one we need. What the fuck?
[00:47:47.637] Kent Bye: Well, my temperament is to be very optimistic and hopeful. And so maybe I'm grasping onto these little things in a world, in a context where it's harder and harder these days to find hope. When you look at everything that's happening in the world and being involved in this industry and everything else, like, do you find some semblance of peace and hope just in being able to connect to your community and maybe give them a little bit of joy, or maybe feel like you're able to leave some of your messages that you're embedding within your game and to do your part to be able to maybe. Bend the arc towards justice or what is it that you find hope in?
[00:48:23.248] Anton Hand: I mean at its core at this point, I would say I I'm I Know I'm always conflicted because obviously there are many things that I do From a deeply symbolic place from a place that's sort of like rooted in what I find to be ethical rooted in the sort of sort of safe space that I want to generate within a community for a certain group of people and making absurd things. I think one of the reasons that I'm so fascinated by absurdism in general, thematically, like why H3 is this mashup of hyper realism and utter farcical absurdism, these sort of six foot tall sentient hot dogs who are quite friendly, is because I think if there's one place where I sort of become a bit techno-utopian. It's that I think placing a person in a virtual environment that is a combination of the familiar and that which puts you at ease and makes you feel safe and the radically absurd that contains unanswerable things and novel things and humorous things puts someone in a unique enough place that they might be able to change. or might be able to think about something from a new angle. I think that's the aspect of VR that's still fascinating to me, is sort of reality jamming, as it were. And obviously I still care about that enough to keep going. I'm honest with myself, so I know a portion of it is just comfort and ego and inertia and what my habits are and such. So I wouldn't fool myself into saying that there is some sort grand ideological journey that I'm on here in terms of the art that I'm making. Only, only small tactical gestures here and there. I do think it's all fucked in the end. Like I'm, what's that term? Blackpilled? Like Siberia's already a hundred, like it's so hot there. They're like, we didn't think it was going to be this bad in 2050. And it's that hot two days ago. I'm like, yeah, it's all going to burn sooner than anyone is ready for. And I'm just going to have a really great time until then. I guess at the end of the day, the sort of philosophy I has, I'm going to try to hurt the fewest number of people that I can manage to in my day-to-day existence in this super-compromised, fucked-up life we lead in this broken country until the wall of fire comes.
[00:50:59.978] Kent Bye: Wow. Well, I know that you've changed your Twitter handle to Doomton. So I think we saw a bit of that, but at the end of the, all my interviews, I like to ask folks, you know, the ultimate potential. And I think we've explored a lot of the dystopic potentials here that a lot of the risks and the harms, but what do you think the most exalted or the ultimate potential of the medium could be and what it might be able to enable if we were to live into that? I mean,
[00:51:30.016] Anton Hand: I don't know. I think I hope that as we begin to lose more and more things that have been before, we have ruined them. The environment, biodiversity, etc. I hope that a visceral living memory of those things captured in high fidelity in VR is viscerally painful enough for people to realize what has been lost, that it can stir enough collective behavior such that our species doesn't go extinct. That's what I would call the highest hope that I might have for VR.
[00:52:19.006] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:52:27.245] Anton Hand: I don't know. I guess if I could encourage one thing, it would be that if one studies the history and theory of war, it's that the partisan always has certain inalienable advantages. You know, the United States has thrashed itself to the tune of trillions of dollars against a rocky deserts and Afghan mountains, learning this lesson the hard way. Even in the face of a huge organization like Facebook, one person can still be significantly disruptive in all sorts of creative ways that a corporation has no way to respond to, at least in any sort of efficient manner. And that I know there are people who will be listening to this who have their own little book of dirt from their past four or five years of experience. with the Panopticon, I would encourage them to find creative uses of it.
[00:53:34.644] Kent Bye: Well, Anton, I know that in discussing before talking to you and during and after, I think I myself am in this midst of this trying to figure out how can I exert my agency in the most productive way. And I think that you're on that journey as well. And I think that you've found your outlets. And my intention and my hope is that for anybody that's listening to this, they can find out for whatever their most highly leveraged thing that they can do to be able to help and participate because it's, from my perspective, it's really going to take everybody working together and standing up to be able to create a future that doesn't exist yet. And if we sleepwalk and stay unconscious that we kind of see where this may be headed and that to steer the ship in a different direction is really going to take everybody taking action to be able to do something that's different. And, uh, hopefully we can each find in our own little ways. And for me, it was a beginning just with having this conversation with you. So I just wanted to, uh, thank you for taking the time and sharing your thoughts and, uh, your experiences and your stories. And, uh, yeah, just thanks for joining me on the podcast today.
[00:54:32.661] Anton Hand: Thanks for having me. It's been my pleasure.
[00:54:35.781] Kent Bye: So that was Anton Han. He's a member of Russ limited and he's the project lead for hot dogs, horseshoes, and hair grenades. So I've a number of different takeaways about this conversation is that first of all, Well, overall, I think the temperament between Anton and myself are like the polar opposites in terms of pessimism and optimism and realism and idealism. I'd like to think that maybe the truth lies somewhere in between our extreme polarity points and that there's a lot of grains of truth that I think that Anton's speaking to. And I'm also hopeful that there could be change and that, you know, this isn't necessarily the thing that we're destined for, that this is the best we can get and that there's nothing that anybody can do to change it or that it is going to be as bad as everybody fears. However, I do think that there is a real risk that everything is precisely moving in towards like the worst case scenario of this, what Anton says is helping to build this hellish corpo panopticon. So Anton has made the decision not to do any business with Facebook. That's perfectly fine. And I think that has meant that he's been speaking very freely online and social media. And so people identified him as someone who they may be able to go and confide different experiences that they've had and frustrations that they've had with Facebook. And I think broadly speaking, he was making a number of different claims in terms of the general behavior. Just to recount some of the things that Anton said around the specific developer community, he says, it's a bit of an open secret about how poorly the entire VR developer community has been treated since the beginning. being screamed at, being bald-faced lied to, being gaslit, getting the runaround in terms of launch windows and pricing and what others are doing and just outright trying to manipulate folks and, you know, as some other folks have reported on Twitter, just outright threats that they're going to be destroyed or that, you know, they're going to look forward to being hired. I mean, just like generally not great behavior to be able to really cultivate a lot of trust within the ecosystem of developers. Now, there's no specifics. There's nothing that I could say, OK, I'm going to independently verify this. I think it just fits into a larger pattern that I've seen personally from talking to lots of developers, which is that there's a lot more of a one-way communication when it comes to Facebook. They make a decision, and it just sort of put upon the larger community. And there doesn't seem to be much back and forth and dialogue and conversation. It's just a decision has been made, and this is what they're going to be doing and sort of thrusting it upon the community. you know, when he talks about, like, going to Valve and being able to give feedback, and that feedback was received, and it felt like this mutual respect of giving and receiving, and that Anton says that all the developer relations meetings that he had with Facebook was much more about them asking him questions, have him answer, and then kind of gaslight him of saying why he's wrong, and then trying to give to him the corporate line of what the official policy is, and that the decision that had already been made is immutable, and there's nothing that anybody could do to change it. And that's kind of what it felt like with this decision, because it was almost like they made a press release, they sent it out, and then I asked if there was going to be anyone that was made available for an interview or conversation, and then they said no interviews are going to be made available at this time. So essentially this is a dictate, this is not up for negotiation, it's an immutable decision, this is happening, and it's already done, essentially. And I think that's not necessarily a great way to build trust with the ecosystem or to really listen to the needs. I mean, there could be a lot of really valid reasons for why Facebook needs to do this in terms of trying to not manage multiple identity systems. And there's a lot of technical overhead. They haven't really done a great job of being able to really bootstrap a lot of the social VR. Maybe this is going to be different. Maybe using the social graph is going to do a lot of good. But there's also a lot of unintended potential harms that could come from turning virtual reality into a giant surveillance machine and taking and adjusting all of our biometric data and putting it into the Facebook ecosystem, which, you know, who knows where that ends up going. And we don't have a lot of trust that Facebook's going to do the right thing here. And again, I think a lot of this is enshrouded in both NDAs as well as like just a general culture of fear of people not willing to go up and speak out. I was very impressed to see Darshan be able to at least do his Twitter thread to people and say, okay, this is what's happening. And, you know, other people who have kind of written off Facebook, either Greg Fodor or Anton Han being very vocal, but there's certainly a lot of developers who are not willing to put their entire career on the line to be able to speak out for the type of behavior that they're doing. And I think that for me just creates this culture of fear that it's difficult for people to really come forth and just share their experiences. And I think the risk here is just that there's so much power that's consolidated within one company that they can just do whatever they want. And there's no recourse to be able to actually engage and interact with people or to listen to people and to really. address some of these different needs and if you are working on a product that could be competing with some of Facebook's core technologies that they have not developed yet, but they have on their roadmap develop in the future as to be potential huge revenue streams if you're a developer that is threatening that then you stand risk of having Facebook just trample you and to do where they can to set these policies that are in some ways discouraging competition and taking a step back and looking what's happening with Epic and Apple, you know, that's part of the lawsuit is that there's some of these monopolistic behaviors that like Apple won't admit any application that's going to be direct competition to some of their apps. This specific case for Epic is around being able to bypass their payment system. And so it's what right does the future of all mobile technologies have for Apple and Google forever to be able to take a 30% cut of everything that ever happens on their platform? I mean, that doesn't happen with PCs right now. You can go to Amazon and buy something and like the creator of the PC doesn't get the right to be able to take 30% cut. But for whatever reason, the mobile technologies with this closed mindset has said that they've created so much value in this communication network that they feel like they have the right to be able to take a 30% cut. Well, that's basically the same path that Facebook is heading down is this app store model where they want to be able to control every transaction that happens and that they're going to feel like they have the right to be able to take a 30% cut, just like Apple and Google have been doing. You know, this lawsuit is trying to challenge that concept and trying to bring some larger antitrust actions. But Anton's point was that we've reached this apocalyptic level where a game company is doing what's functionally like an ad campaign for V-Bucks as a intro sesh for a performative lawsuit to be able to bring this about. relying upon these billionaire led companies to be able to fight these trillion dollar market cap companies to be able to battle this. And that's our largest hope. And I think, you know, it is quite depressing. And hopefully we can live into a future where we're not being controlled so much by a lot of these different corporations, especially if they're going to be doing these different actions that could be questionable. There's a lawsuit that's happening with Epic and Apple, but at this point, things are so nascent within the VR community that at this point, VR developers are even afraid to come forward and speak up and to say, this is what my experience is because they're just afraid of being blacklisted and being completely eliminated. So if there are people who feel like they have no other recourse, then feel free to reach out to me, kent at kentbuy.com. And if you want to talk more or You can reach out at Kent Byeon Twitter as well if you'd like to speak more. I'm happy to have more conversations. Just because I think where there's smoke, there's fire. I think there's probably a lot more of these different types of experiences that are happening out there. You know, I think there's just a general lack of discussion. And at this point, you know, there's nothing that I could take to Facebook and say, can you respond to this? Because a lot of these are vague hearsay allegations, but there's just a general pattern of not listening and not being engaged and just kind of doing whatever they want. And I think that's just bad behavior for the future of VR. And like Anton said, maybe they're at the point where they're kind of just discarding all the interest of the enthusiast community and their, going to push forward virtual reality into the mass market and that, you know, they're going to kind of steamroll and trample over all the other independent developers that may get in their way and that they're going to do what they're going to do. And so, I don't know, I think there's deeper concerns here in terms of like the patterns of behavior here. I have a lot of my specific concerns around biometric data privacy and the implications of, you know, having surveillance capitalism being tied into the core fabric of the future of the VR medium. I think there's just a lot of unanswered questions that need to be addressed in some fashion. And I'd love to be able to talk to more folks there about that. But again, that's a lot of unanswered questions that I've had for the last couple of years about this issue as I've been continuing to cover it in different contexts. And I think the point to end on, which is the hopeful point, which is that at the end of all of this, even if Anton believes that it's all going to go to hell and end up in systemic collapse, he's still working on his project and wanting to do this reality jamming because he's blending this hyper-realistic with absurdist humor that is trying to, in some sense, give people new perspectives about the world. You know, he certainly got a glib take on things in a lot of ways, but I think, you know, there's a certain amount of pragmatic realism where, you know, as much as I could be resistant to the dark realities of some of where things are going, I think there's a real risk that this is the path that we're heading down where there's going to be just a handful of mega corporations that are in control of what we can say or do and to be able to track everything that is happening within our lives and within these virtual contexts and to be able to mine all this information and to hand it over directly to the government and create this panopticon surveillance machine from VR where we have no recourse to be able to actually have any sort of democratic say. So that's not the future of VR that I want, and I'd love to be able to just be more in open dialogue and to have more of a collaborative effort of building it together rather than just being dictated by the profit-driven motives of a singular company. Now, if you take a step back pragmatically and say, okay, what can really be done? I think there needs to be more competition. There needs to be more open alternatives. And we can't just have one market leader that's going to dominate the entire market. And if there's no other viable competitor for standalone VR, then we actually need a lot of other help. But just in hearing from Anton, the state of the developer relations from all the other companies. I don't have a lot of faith that there's a lot of folks that are really tied into what's happening at the grassroots level and are listening to the needs of developers or really trying to create something that is a viable competitor. So I guess we all have to throw up our hands and say it is what it is for now, or to find ways that you can have your own level of resistance. Anton was citing this concept of partisan warfare. So warfare that's happening outside of organized armies and that each of us as individuals can find our own way to kind of disrupt things that we maybe disagree with, with the future of where this is all going. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So, you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
