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Comment by kettlecorn | Hacker News Reader

Why the next 2 months?

Yeah, curious why the next two months? We're definitely going to be implementing the VRM avatar format fairly soon, but not VR just yet. There are plenty of unsolved problems on desktop where there's a much larger user base. And we also still have mobile design and optimization to work on. I've worked on AltspaceVR and Mozilla Hubs and as much as I love VR, especially WebXR, it's still a relatively small market. We will support WebXR, but it's not our top priority right now.

I'm expecting other projects to try to do the same thing, and a large first-mover advantage. "Two months" was just a vague number thrown out: VRChat banned mods in July, that's two months ago, and I think a first prototype that zeroes in on the VRChat niche is viable after four months of work, especially if one is pivoting from an existing codebase.

I'm not saying "you should focus on VR", I'm saying "if then, else then." The value proposition for social 3D chat on desktop is just not there, IMO.

Ah, yeah what's happened with VRChat is a shame. I don't think we're building the same thing though. We'd like to go far beyond social 3D chat, that may be what it looks like right now, but our aspirations are towards building an open platform for publishing and hosting your own events, experiences, games, and applications. There's a much larger audience for that on desktop.

I think in general, from a product perspective, the way to build a big platform is to solve a small problem completely and then iterate. But that's your choice.

(Firefox made the same mistake, I believe: there's no market in being the second-best product for a large userbase, instead of being the very best for a smaller.)

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