Will the Minecraft experience ever be available on standalone VR?
This past May, a user by the name of “Siroto” left a post on Mojang’s official feedback site requesting the release of Minecraft on the Oculus Quest. Since its posting, the suggestion has received over 5,700 votes, securing its position as the third most-supported submission on the site.
After months of vague responses and sparse communication, this week the company provided a response to the community. In a message posted to Reddit by confirmed Minecraft Bedrock developer u/CornerHard, the team member acknowledged the public demand for standalone VR support before elaborating on the difficulties in porting such an experience to the Oculus Go and Quest.
One of the major things holding up the Go was a library dependency which my team has been adding for the upcoming 1.14 update. That’s necessary but not sufficient – when we add a new platform, we have to support it fully in our daily testing, both with hardware and more importantly with time from everyone working on it. The Quest will be extra engineering work above and beyond the Go. I can’t promise either version until they officially have the green light.
I sent everyone to the feedback site because it’s the best way to get the demand for Go and Quest versions of Minecraft in front of the key decision makers, and everyone’s votes putting Minecraft for Go and Quest in the top 5 on the feedback site has been really valuable. There are so many different competing areas for Minecraft to expand that it’s important to say, “Hey! Make us a priority!”
I know from the outside it probably feels like it’s a faceless corporation that’s not responding at all, but we’re gamers too, and there are several Oculus fans at Mojang with Rift, Go, and Quest. We’d love to have the game on all the platforms. A lot of the inner workings of a major game franchise are more complicated than they might seem, though.
So while it does sound as though the Oculus Quest community has managed to garner the attention of the higher-ups at Minecraft, it sounds as we could be waiting some time for an official release on Go or Quest as the company directs its attention to various other ongoing projects. With the release of Minecraft Earth taking place over the course of October, no doubt the team has their hands full.
Minecraft is currently available on tethered PC VR headsets, including Oculus Rift/Rift S and Windows Mixed Reality, as well as the Gear VR.
Feature Image Credit: Microsoft