tobias_platen's blog
Tobias Alexandra Platen's software freedom blog
VRChat Enshittification
A year ago I once played a few hours VRChat. When I tried to play VRChat again, the game did not launch. I decided to do a clean install of Debian 13, Steam and VRChat so that I can play VRChat again. In one year there were many changes in VRChat including in-game purchases. Most avatars that users can select, now come with a price tag. Importing avatars in VRM format is still possible, but not easy and developer tools are needed to do so. You also need to install Blender and Unity. While Blender is free software, Unity is not. VRChat is also known to use anti-chat software. While VRChat is compatible with Valve’s Proton, it does not run natively on GNU/Linux and will never run on the Talos II.
The version for Meta Quest is even worse. I expect that Android and iOS versions are as bad as the Meta Quest version. Since I do not own any Apple hardware and plan to replace Android with GNU/Linux, I will never install any of the mobile versions. Since V-Sekai and Overte are free software, I will be able to replace VRChat on both mobile devices and desktop, including the mobile VR usecase.
V-Sekai has to potential to replace VRChat, but currently is a very incomplete alpha version. It can run on Windows, GNU/Linux and even Android including on the POWER9 CPU that the Talos II uses. At the moment V-Sekai is not usable with a VR-Headset, such as my Valve Index. A port for Meta Quest does not exist, but is theoretically possible. Many components of V-Sekai can be added to games that use the Godot Oculus Quest Toolkit, such as Godot Beep Saber VR.
There is also a project called Overte, maintainted by Overte e.V. which can run natively on GNU/Linux. Overte is based on a VR platform by High Fidelity and shares some code with Vircadia. Overte is currently the best free replacement for VRChat. I recently began packaging Overte for GNU Guix, a purely functional package manager for the GNU system. Overte has good documentation and can be built from source on Debian and Ubuntu.