I interviewed Eric Masher, Chief Operating Officer for Impact Reality and Flat2VR Studios, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
Here’s the trailer for the first four releases for Flat2VR Studios:
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Music: Fatality
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my coverage of MetaConnect 2024, today's episode is with Eric Masher, who is the Chief Operating Officer for both Impact Reality as well as Flat2VR Studios. So at the Upload VR Summer Showcase, the Flat2VR studios actually showed four different titles that they're working on. And so for me, it was really exciting just because you kind of have these people that really started in the context of the modder community, and then they start to work officially with IP for these different classic games. Now with the flat two VR studios, which is really like a collaboration with Impact Reality, bringing in some of those original mods and developers and then bringing them into the folds to start to have a proper studio along with the Impact Reality, which is covering a lot of the marketing needs for some of these XR projects. And so really kind of an interesting entity that I had a chance to talk to Jasmine Unizo last year at MetaConnect and then Eric is the chief operating officer, and there's other co-founders of Impact Reality that I had a chance to run into over the course of MetaConnect, but never run into them all at the same time. But I was able to run into Eric at the very beginning of my last day there at MetaConnect and sat down to have this conversation to get a little bit more of his journey into this space and then what's happening with Flat2VR Studios. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Eric happened on Thursday, September 26th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:44.807] Eric Masher: My name is Eric Masher. I am currently the Chief Operating Officer for Impact Reality and Flat2VR Studios. I've been in the VR XR space for about seven years. I started off just building communities in virtual reality space trying to bring some new people into VR when the Quest was originally coming in. Lots of new people didn't know anything about the technology. I was trying to build communities of people that were understanding to help people along and then I started working with developers and Did some title advisement for publishing. That's how I got to know Meta a little bit. I did that for three different publishing companies. And then about two and a half years ago, we started Impact Reality with Jasmine Uniza from VR with Jasmine and Harry Skiva from Between Realities. The three of us started it.
[00:02:27.332] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:31.474] Eric Masher: Yeah. Yeah. So I basically have been an entrepreneur all my life. Owned several businesses. Been a gamer forever. I started with an Atari 2600 when I was a kid. Loved games, loved gaming. Fell out of it for a period of time when I had my daughter. Me and my wife had our daughter, and virtual reality kind of brought me back in again, rekindled a fire for me for gaming. I thought it was next level, and I basically gave up all the businesses I had to figure out to do something in virtual reality. I knew there was a technology that, again, it ignited a passion in me. that i hadn't felt in a long time for gaming and i wanted to be part of it in some way so basically worked from that moment on again building communities trying to bring as many new people into the space as possible and then you know again working with developers trying to like bridge that gap between consumer developer quite a bit and then on the publishing side as well so i was i was just trying to figure out how i get into that space and it's not easy i was older i'm older person so you know, jumping into it, finding a passion, doing what you dream about doing all your life, you can still do it as an older person, which is great. So I was 44 years old when I started doing this, you know, seven years ago. So yeah, I just gave everything up to make sure I could do something in VR.
[00:03:43.134] Kent Bye: And where did you begin? Because, you know, with Impact Reality, it's a lot of stuff you're working on now. But what were you doing in your entry points leading up to that?
[00:03:49.338] Eric Masher: Yeah, I mean, so for Impact Reality, we really began this as a PR and marketing firm. We saw a hole in the industry where there was no PR and marketing firms for virtual reality. It was a lot of traditional flat gaming, PC console gaming, PR and marketing firms that had no idea how to market for virtual reality were getting... Indie small mid-level developers into a lot of bad contracts with not a lot of help, you know, no visibility for their game You know, they didn't know how to do it. So they thought they knew how to do it They thought they could do it traditional way and they couldn't so Jasmine and Steve and myself saw that hole the three of us were really good friends together through the creator community and We really just said, you know, we should do something together. We were each individually doing small things for developers or with other publishers and And we said, you know, let's do something together where we can help a lot of people. And that's where we did that. And then we took a shift about a year and a half ago. We brought in Elliot Tate, who is a marketing genius, and also started the Vsaber modding community, helped build Zenith to what it was, helped build SynthRiders to what it was, and also started the Flat2VR modding community. And that was where we really took a shift. And we decided that, yes, we want to do PR and marketing because we think it's important. But we had an opportunity to do something that we really love, which is gaming. And then the flat to VR studios part of it was we have a really good business model here. Elliot had a really good, passionate community of monitors, but they had no business plan. They had no structure. They had no way to do anything with it other than be a side project or a passion project. So all of us coming together, we basically said, you know, we can put structure to what you have as a passion and what you've already done with all of these different modders and all these different games that you brought that people absolutely love. Let's put a structure to it. Let's put a business plan behind it and let's bring it to official stores to where people don't have to figure out how to mod it. Like there's a lot of people out there that don't want to mod because they don't know how to do it. You know, it can be a difficult thing to do. So we want to make it a one click, one buy to where everybody can enjoy it. And that's going to mean, you know, bringing it to the meta platform on the standalone.
[00:05:51.377] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know there's been a number of different games that are on the Steam store, like Half Half Alyx 2, where there was mods to bring VR versions where there wasn't a VR version. And there's other injectors to basically edit the binaries to have VR capabilities. sometimes it's official modder, sometimes it's like people going out on their own. So maybe you could just describe that landscape of that ecosystem of like eventually potentially even collaborating with like the developer to have official support to like people who are like have existing modding support that they're doing and then like people who are just kind of like going rogue and doing whatever they can to have that experience, but then maybe potentially on a pathway so that it's like an official version. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about that ecosystem and that full spectrum of different types of modders that are out there taking these 2D games and translating them to VR.
[00:06:42.523] Eric Masher: Yeah, it was great that you brought up Half Flight 2 VR mod because that was one of our developers that was Flat2VR who did that. If you look at the Steam page, Flat2VR Studios is listed as the publisher and that was in collaboration directly with Valve and they gave the source code up to Kabalistic who is one of our devs working on RoboQuest currently for us right now. Yeah, and he did an amazing job in that mod. That's perfect. And Valve was able to allow him to put it to the store where when you can just hit the download button and it automatically does it. There's no special modding. And that was kind of the catalyst of what we wanted to do and where we saw that potential to go. But it's a process. Like, you know, what you just said with how do you go to and get the IP? You know, most of the original IP holders of some of these classic games had an interest in the VR. They saw the mods, right? And there was a lot of communication. A lot of them are in discords, and they're in other places. And they see a person doing a passionate mod of their flat game. And there's communication there of just mutual admiration. But there was never any business plan there. So it's like a lot of them. had communication and just couldn't take it to the next step. So for me and for, you know, Flat2VR Studios with Jasmine and Harry and Elliot coming in, it was basically just a process of then reconnecting, saying, we're here, we're all coming together. We're going to form Flat2VR Studios. We have the business structure. Let's sit down and talk about what it takes to get your IP. how we can show you a beneficial profit from giving us your IP. And then we'll show you a path of how we're going to make your game great in VR. We are not porters. We don't do that. Porting is almost a bad word for us, because we don't want to just port things over. The worst thing in the world is when you get into a VR game that was a flat game, and you go, why am I doing this in VR? What was the purpose of this? especially if you're just doing a point-and-click or button presses. You have to make things make sense in VR, and that's a lot of what we do. So you talked about the UEVR injector. You talked about things like Vorpex. There's ways to get games into VR, and that's great. It's a good entry level. But number one, they can be hard to do, and number two, they don't still feel 100%. They can get you into the world, but it's not 100% there, and we like to take it to 100%. So we want to take existing code, existing assets. We don't build anything from the ground up. That's not us. There's a lot of good VR companies out there that make built-from-the-ground-up VR games. That's not what our business model is. We want to take the existing game that people absolutely loved and fell in love with, that already had a proven game hook, and we want to take that game, bring it into virtual reality, but make it feel like it belongs in virtual reality. So many people are like, we just experienced that game in VR, but that's not the actual game, right? It was like a re-imagination of what that original game was, but I want that original game. I want that same feeling, that same gameplay loop or the same game hook that was in the original game. I want that full game in VR. And it's just hard to do sometimes when you're trying to build it from the ground up. But if we can take the original assets, if we can take the code, and then our modders can work on it, our developers can work on it to the point where it feels good in VR. That's what we're really all about.
[00:09:35.807] Kent Bye: I know there's been long time VR developers like Denny Unger who's been very critical of this process of the ports or at least games that were really designed for 2D and then having people go into VR having a bad experience or getting motion sick or all these other considerations that actually could be more of an overall detriment to VR as an industry. So I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and reflections on that. It sounds like you're trying to, at least with what you just said, trying to get onto a path where it actually is trying to get more of those native integrations. But it is a dynamic out there where people want to be immersed in some of these games. And sometimes those games just may not make sense in VR, even though people can go into VR. But from Denny's perspective, overall, it kind of pollutes the overall ecosystem.
[00:10:21.061] Eric Masher: And it can. It can hurt it. We've seen it many times. Again, you use the word port, right? If you have somebody out there that doesn't maybe understand fully what it feels like to play a good VR game, and they're just like, I can just take that game and I can just make it in VR and not do anything special to it to make it feel good in VR, it can be a bad experience. And it's something that we want to avoid because it hurts everybody. It hurts the industry. If you get somebody who jumped into VR for the first time because you just brought their favorite game there, and they go in and go, wow, this is not what I wanted. You know, that's a bad thing. And that's what we're trying to avoid. And that's why, again, we hate the word port. We don't ever do a port. We do a conversion of a flat game into virtual reality, but make it feel right. Give you an example. We are taking the game, our first game that's going to be launching this fall is Trombone Champ. Very popular game on the Nintendo Switch and very popular on Steam. It has a huge following. One of our modders or developers now actually made a VR mod of it, and the original developers loved it. And that's how we had that entryway into getting the IP. But that game's a completely 2D game. If you look at it, this makes no sense in VR. You can't make this work or feel good. But what we've done is a completely reimagining of this game to where we have converted everything into 3D. We've taken the flat surface of the game and completely made it 360 so you can see everything that you want to see. We've made the controls, the motion controls, feel like you're actually playing a trombone instead of just doing a button press or a mouse click with your keyboard. to the point where our biggest compliment is the original IP holder and the original developing team said this is their favorite way to play the game now. It's a game that feels like it was always meant for VR now, which can't ask for a better compliment than that.
[00:11:57.438] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know at the recent Upload Summer Showcase, there's a number of different titles that you announced a lot of things that were going to be coming down the pike. And was that the first time that you had announced your lineup and really came out and said, this is where we're going as a company, trying to take these existing IP and translate them into VR? And I'd love to just hear about that as a moment and the history of your venture.
[00:12:17.779] Eric Masher: Yeah, I mean, this was a huge point for myself, Jasmine, you know, he's our CEO, you know, Harry Skida Skiva, who was our CTO, and then Elliot Tate, who was kind of the catalyst of all this, and he's our chief creative officer, and he's the creative genius behind every game that we do. and bringing it to make it feel good in VR, and that was our coming out. It was such a big moment for us because we've all been passionate VR people for such a long time, and for us to announce our first four games that we had coming, it was important for us. We wanted to be a part of that showcase, we thought it was a big moment, but we wanted more than one game to show. We know there's a lot of expectations on Flat2VR Studios because it has a big following of passionate VR people, and we were just We were a little bit nervous about showing one title, maybe only being Trombone Champ, even though we think it's going to be a huge success. So it was important for us to show some range. So we showed Trombone Champ as our final video of that sequence, but we started with Wrath, Aeon of Ruin, which is a game that we're working with Team Beef, who's an amazing modding group. And we've partnered with Team Beef as FlatVR Studios to work with them and help them find their first path officially to stores. So we showed Wrath Aeon of Ruin, which is a boomer shooter, Doom-esque game, to show some range there. We went then into FlatOut, which is a high-speed, fast-paced racing game that looks amazing, that had a huge cult following. And then we went into RoboQuest, which is from a publisher called Starbreeze, who's had a VR pass, the Star VR, and they did the game Payday, which is extremely popular. And we were able to get the IP for RoboQuest, which is another game that... I played flat and I thought it was such an amazing game. And I'm like, this game feels like they made it for VR. And I just went and knocked on the door and said, you need to let us do this game in VR. And that's how that happened. A lot of these things come out of a passion of I enjoy playing this game. I want to play this game in VR. Let's go make it happen. And it's a great roguelite shooter. It's fast-paced, mostly a platform shooter. So it showed a little bit of range there. And then we finished with Trombone Champ announcement at that point as well, kind of showing that we can do fun, meme-y things that just make sense in VR. So I think it was a good four first titles to show for us. And we've got more. We're going to launch five games next year. We plan to launch eight games the year after. Again, our team, we have a huge team of great VR people that with us throughout both sides, the Impact Reality PR Marketing, and then also in the Flat2VR spot. So we're poised to really have a nice couple of years here. It's going to be exciting.
[00:14:42.466] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm very curious around this collaboration that you have with these different modding communities, because it seems like these communities are very passion driven. They're just doing it out of love of it. But yet, it sounds like with this collaboration with Impact Reality and Flat 2 VR Studios that there's a way for them to potentially actually get paid and make this a career path, which is maybe a little unorthodox of starting with modding. So I'm curious how that works in terms of if these are just one-offs, or if this is like you're hiring on these developers as part of your team, If you just end up doing like these contracts where people kind of come and go context dependent upon whatever project may be happening in the existing communities that are already there and just find a way to support what is already happening. So I'd love to hear like how that works in those relationships.
[00:15:25.623] Eric Masher: yeah i mean it's a great question because it was one of the most important things of again the reason behind doing all this was we saw all these people doing this stuff as passion you know doing it they're part-time not getting any pay at all being stuck in different jobs and maybe wanting to be a developer full-time just having no path to get there and we had all these amazing people that we consider our unicorns that are just super talented know what they're doing people that are reverse engineering code with, you know, they're building games without code. And we're like, we need to figure out a path to get these people to do what they want to do. And, you know, it's all over the place. Like we have some that are just like, hey, I love my job, but I want to still do this as a passion. I don't mind doing it as a side thing. So they'll come in and they'll work part time as a contractor. We have people that We have basically made their dreams come true and they are able to quit their regular job, whatever they were doing. And now there are full time developers, you know, making good pay, involved in a project, super happy and passionate about what they're doing. And then we have some that are mix of both that will maybe just come in for a period of time and, you know, be full time, but then maybe want to move on to something else at some point. And there's more. As we grow and we're able to hopefully be very successful, there's a lot more of them out there that we want to bring in and that we will. We're going to spin up a whole bunch of more teams. We'll have more games coming. As we gain more IPs, we'll have more following. And we'll be able to do that because there's a lot more talented people out there that we just want to be able to give that path to. And we've been very happy. And some of the biggest names that you'll see out there with us, like Rakiparda, who is doing the Trombone Champ mod, he did Firewatch, and he did The Stanley Parable, which is amazing. He did the Outer Wilds, super talented. And then Kabbalistic, again, who did Far Cry. He did Half-Life VR, 2VR, which is amazing. And then many others. There's so many smaller people that are doing pieces of work for us that are part of the community. But yeah, we want to bring them all in if we can.
[00:17:12.671] Kent Bye: Well, it sounds like that there was existing communities with Flat2VR. I remember following and tracing what they were doing for a number of years before this more official partnership with Impact Reality. And so what was the Flat2VR before it became the studios? Because I remember a Twitter account. I remember seeing a lot of stuff. Were they involved with the Unreal Injector? Or were they just having these one-offs? Maybe describe how the Flat2VR came about before there was this official partnership with Impact Reality.
[00:17:39.642] Eric Masher: Yeah, it was, again, built on a passion, built on a community by Elliot Tate. There was a lot of really good modders out there, you know, Kabbalistic, Rocky Parda, Elliot, super talented, smart people that just wanted to see their favorite games in VR. And they put together a Discord and started building a community and putting out amazing mods for people to play with and then maybe even work on a little bit on their own. They, in turn, brought other people in to help work. And that community has grown. The Discord's well over 100,000 people now. And yeah, and Elliot worked with a lot of them. Elliot kind of started this whole thing. It was his catalyst of bringing all these people together. And then he did work with Prey Dog on the Unreal Injector mod. helped work that out with him. Elliot's really smart with, again, the marketing side he's brilliant on, but just the whole idea of coding and how we re-engineer these things to make them work. And then what are those processes in place now that we're using to make our processes faster? Can anybody do this? Not really, no, because we've been doing this over 33 mods over the past three years. that have been completed. All that work, all that trial and error, all that reverse engineering, all those different plans and processes they put in place, different programs that we have now that we're able to do things much faster with, those were all put in place by Elliott. Elliott and the other modders together. You know, again, when I say unicorns, these are some of the brightest people I've ever seen. And I've known developers in this space for a long time. The fact that these people are out there doing it as a passion and nobody knew about them, that they could be developers, or because they didn't have a great resume that said they were a developer, just didn't get a chance. And now we're able to basically kind of go find all those unicorns and bring them all together.
[00:19:18.442] Kent Bye: In terms of the current market and ecosystem for the Quest, I'd love to hear some of your comments on how's that Quest ecosystem going. I know that Meta has renamed the app store to be Meta Horizon. There's a lot of Horizon worlds that get caught up into some of the searches and everything. like almost becoming more difficult for those third party apps to actually have visibility and to be seen and be discovered in a way that even Meta has seemingly prioritized their own first party properties with Horizon World. So love to hear some of your reflections on some of those infrastructure changes and how that impacts what you're doing there at Impact Reality.
[00:19:53.087] Eric Masher: Yeah, I mean, you know, whatever anybody thinks about meta and the Quest ecosystem, it's where everybody has to be. If you're a development team and you're not building for Quest, you're probably in trouble in some way. That doesn't mean that we only want to build for Quest. We want to build for PlayStation. We want to build for Steam and then other headsets as well that are coming in the future are already out there now. But that ecosystem is super hard right now. Like things have changed. It's an open market now. With App Lab being gone, It has flooded the market with games. There's so many titles now and discoverability is harder than ever. Jasmine, our CEO, did a great talk yesterday for a standing room only room of developers who are all asking the same question. How do we become visible in an ocean full of games? Again, it's harder than ever, even for them. Maybe the middle of the road or even the AAA games were easier to discover. to be discovered before, they're kind of almost being washed out a little bit now. So for me, developers have to look way early on. Jasmine talked about one of the things yesterday that we do at Trombone Champ. Almost all the way through that development process, we were like, in the development, how can we help market the game within development? And that's what a lot of people have to be thinking now. Usually marketing now, is always an afterthought. Like, you finish the game, and they're about a month before launch, and they're like, okay, let's figure out our marketing plan, which is almost a path for failure at that point because you really need to be thinking about it almost from the beginning. You know, Jasmine is the CEO, but she's also been the title producer on all of our titles so far and she has done a great job of having that marketing mind in the middle of the game development design and figuring those things out what are those viral moments that we can find inside the game or we can put in the game to help us when it is time to market these things and that ecosystem is completely flooded now I don't know what this ecosystem is gonna look like I don't even know like we're in the middle of it now with many many games coming and I I don't know what this next six months is going to look like. And I don't know if Meta does right now. We don't have a lot of answers from Meta other than it's a work in progress. I think they've done the right thing with putting away App Lab, kind of getting rid of it. But it's brought up problems. It's brought up problems for developers who weren't in App Lab before. But it's helped a lot that we're in App Lab and we're stuck with discoverability problems. So I think this question six months from now will probably be easier for me to answer.
[00:22:05.475] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and this type of immersive gaming that you're working on might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:22:17.253] Eric Masher: I still think, even though we've been in a little bit of a down market for over a year now in gaming in general, I do believe we're on the precipice of a turn. I do believe that virtual reality gaming and XR gaming, however you want to call it, is extremely important for what we do moving forward. I still think it's going to take the place of pretty much everything else you know we've doubled down on it companies that have invested in us have doubled down on it and i think that we're going to help that like i think you know being able to bring your favorite game that you played maybe 10 years ago or eight years ago five years or two years ago but bring that exact game into virtual reality it's just going to help it it's going to bring more people to the headset you know cheaper headsets lighter headsets you know i'm looking forward to what we're doing three years from now like what is that going to look like how easy is it it's going to be cloud gaming at that point you know is everything going to be pc quality you know what do we look like in the form factor of the headset when i don't have to worry about an hour's worth of time being as long as people want to spend maybe 45 minutes but what if they can spend three hours like you would see on a console or a pc because it's lightweight and it's not hot that's the stuff that i'm ready to see and like i think we're getting there like I'm very optimistic on meta and other headsets. You know, Google and Samsung look very interesting right now. You know, I'm more optimistic now than I was a year ago about, I think, where we are and where we're headed. And yeah, I think it's exciting times for sure.
[00:23:40.739] Kent Bye: A quick follow-on question just on the announcements yesterday around the Quest 3S and having something that's priced at the same level of Quest 2. I imagine that with how successful the Quest 2 was at that price point that then when the Quest 3 launched, it had a lot more capabilities. But with the increased price, I imagine that the overall numbers were more in a downward trend rather than a growing trend. Now with these new announcements, we'll kind of wait and see where it goes. But I'd love to hear some of your thoughts of how the Quest 3S kind of fits into this overall ecosystem of what's happening with meta and their overall gaming ecosystem.
[00:24:11.806] Eric Masher: Yeah, I was extremely happy. For me, this is a huge deal. I mean, I didn't know what Meta's plans were, what they're going to do. I know they've subsidized a lot of these headsets. I thought they were actually going to stay up on the higher end. For them to get a more affordable mixed reality headset is extremely important. I think it's so smart to pack in Batman Arkham with that. It's going to be an amazing experience for a lot of people. It'll bring a lot of people into the headset. At $299, it's super affordable. I mean, it really is. If you're thinking about virtual reality at $299, it's almost a no-brainer for me. It's tough not to go get it, unless you're just like, I just don't get virtual reality. I don't want any part of it. The price point now is so affordable. The hardware is really, really good. I mean, I really wish they would not do the strap that they do. I think it's an uncomfortable strap. I think it's something that turns people off. But other than that, the new Quest 3S is a really, really good headset. The Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip is a really, really good chip. We're just now starting to get into what that can do. What we're going to see that chip be able to do even a year from now is going to be pretty incredible. You're going to see some amazing experiences coming to standalone that you wouldn't even think possible. And eventually we'll say goodbye to the Quest 2 that will take some of those handcuffs off. So I love this new headset. I love the new price point. More people in VR is really good for us. And I really hope it's successful this year. And I think it will be.
[00:25:32.677] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid or any other final thoughts you have for the immersive community?
[00:25:38.260] Eric Masher: Yeah, I would just say, you know, we're a different studio. We are made up of gamers. We're made up of passionate people in the community. A lot of us were content creators doing this because we love the gaming, and that's where we're maybe a little bit different. You know, FlatVR Studios, Impact Reality, Jasmine Yuniz as our CEO, Harry Skigis as our CTO, amazing person. Elliot Tate, chief creative officer and just doing some amazing things. We're a good team. We're a good team of passionate people that really gel well together and all of our strengths really work well and we want to be one of the best companies out there. We have a strive to bring as many great games that you would want to play into virtual reality and yeah, we're going to do that.
[00:26:18.709] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Eric, thanks so much for joining me today to give a little bit more insight as to what's happening in the gaming ecosystem. And all your plans are coming up with flat-to-VR studios. I had a chance to watch the Upload VR Summer Showcase. I think one of the things that people were the most excited around, because it was sort of this new pathway of so many other titles that could be on this way of bringing these beloved IP into VR. And I just saw a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. For me, it was one of the biggest news items that were coming out of that was just the excitement and passion that was this collision of all these different, being at the right place at the right time to bring all these things together. So yeah, very much looking forward to see where you continue to take it all and to see the Trombone Champ Unflattened game that's coming out. And yeah, all the other titles, it sounds like you've got already the next two or three years planned out and I'm sure continuing to expand and grow for all the different stuff as you continue to go down this path. So thanks again for joining me today to help break it all down.
[00:27:11.476] Eric Masher: Yeah, thanks, Ken. I appreciate it. It means a lot coming from you.
[00:27:14.346] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and I would like to invite you to join me on my Patreon. I've been doing the Voices of VR for over 10 years, and it's always been a little bit more of like a weird art project. I think of myself as like a knowledge artist, so I'm much more of an artist than a business person. But at the end of the day, I need to make this more of a sustainable venture. Just $5 or $10 a month would make a really big difference. I'm trying to reach $2,000 a month or $3,000 a month right now. I'm at $1,000 a month, which means that's my primary income. And I just need to get it to a sustainable level just to even continue this oral history art project that I've been doing for the last decade. And if you find value in it, then please do consider joining me on the Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
