Meta’s current flagship VR battle royale game will be free starting March 9.
According to The Verge , the developer BigBox VR has announced that the Population: One game that was acquired by Meta in 2021 will be free to play from March 9. Currently the game is being sold for 30 USD on the store on the Quest Store.
Population: One is a battle royale VR game that was first released in October 2020, it has since become a popular game with an average review score of more than 4 stars from over 11,000 votes on Quest Store and over 2,000 reviews on the Steam platform.
But when it comes to the free-to-play genre, Meta seems to be pushing the game to attract a larger audience than it currently has. This is the scenario that used to happen with PUBG: Battlegrounds .
If Population: One lives up to what Meta expects, the company will not only have a big battle royale game on their hands, but also a brighter future for the metaverse. Specifically, with the sand-box mode recently added to the game, along with some metaverse-y elements, hopefully this VR shooter will ‘save’ Meta from the failures of Horizon Worlds . in the metaverse world.
However, it’s not entirely clear that switching to the free-to-play genre will make the game a huge success. For example, Knockout City , a promising multiplayer handball game, launched as a paid game in 2021 and went free-to-play more than a year later, but the game is about to be discontinued. going live in June. And Meta itself will shut down the free Echo VR in August even though it’s reported to have a steady stream of players.