Beat Saber is still hella fun. I know some people that just play that (but play it daily) on their Quest. I'm not sure Facebook is particularly happy about that, however, since those people aren't buying apps or making them much money (maybe just the occasional song pack).
I'm guessing Beat Saber is the only reason the Quest is even sold in Japan and Korea.
The song packs come out really slowly too. They've released just one song pack with 11 songs on it this year, the Queen one back in May, as well as added 10 songs to existing song packs. For a total of 21 songs total this year so far.
And 210 official songs since it first came out back in 2018.
Meanwhile the PCVR version has a ridiculous 65,000[1] custom songs made for it at this point.
Not sure why they can't get closer to the Rock Band model, where it released new songs all the time, and had 2,743 songs total (and 84 songs THIS YEAR according to Wikipedia[2]...had no idea there was even an actively supported Rock Band game out there still).
Beat Saber should be making them enough money to allow them to at least do double or triple what they're doing now.
I agree! But the modding...that is all legally dubious, it makes sense that Meta can't just release whatever song they want. I wish it could be attached to spotify or something: you get to listen to the song because you have a subscription, and just play custom beat saber levels with it.
Heck, I would be happy if they just were able to do as well as Konami did with DDR. But Meta seems to be taking a slow growth approach on Beat Saber.
I understand they need to get the rights to it, I'm just surprised they aren't more aggressively doing so. Rock Band has shown it should be doable to negotiate a lot more licenses more quickly than they have.
I understand they like to make a bit of a visual stage experience to each song pack, but not every song pack needs that necessarily, and they should also be able to have multiple teams working on song packs in parallel you'd think, as opposed to one every once in a while, even if they insisted on making new visual themes for each one.
As it is, I'd love to buy more song packs from them, but I'm not that into Queen, or Lizzo, or several others they've done the past couple of years (Electronic Mixtape released in May 2022 was the last one that excited me). And other people have their tastes too. Putting out songs more often insures that people have something new they can support and a reason to get back into it more than once every other year.
The reason I brought up the custom songs, is they could potentially use those for ideas of what players would really like to see in the game, based on custom song usage, as well as possibly once they do get rights to those songs, possibly get permission from the creator to use the beat patterns (or whatever they're called) and save some development time.
I know they hired at least one person from the custom song community before, they could potentially get permission from some others (with some compensation).
I had a discussion with someone who had some real knowledge, and they said Meta can't really make a business with Quest just via Beat Saber. It has some backing, but not a lot of backing, most of their effort on Quest are elsewhere.
I totally get that, I just wish it wasn't so. To me, Quest is the ultimate fitness/active but casual gaming device.
I tried going down that rabbit hole once, and it seemed to break things (although I didn't spend a ton of time on it). I own it on Steam too, so I can play custom songs via that. It's just that's tied to my computer upstairs and I usually prefer to play untethered in my living room.
Most of my custom songs on the Quest I've done have actually been for the game Ragnarock, because it doesn't require sideloading anything, just copying files onto your Quest from your computer. That one is quite fun also.
I also have my computer upstairs and Quest in living room, but found that playing through Virtual Desktop works very well.
It does give extra peace of mind having the games run locally on the device in case of connection issues, and to avoid the occasional need to run upstairs to fix something.
honestly, if the quest weren't tied to an account I would have considered getting one just to play beat saber too. it's fun and you feel like you're getting exercise at the same time.
I'm guessing Beat Saber is the only reason the Quest is even sold in Japan and Korea.