PlutoSphere, a cloud-based virtual reality content streaming service, has announced its closure. This service allowed Meta Quest owners to play content SteamVR such as Half-Life: Alyx to name only the best. Adopting a pricing model inspired by arcades, PlutoSphere sold hours of play for “tokens”, with each hour costing between $1 and $3 depending on the number of tokens purchased at a time. Although the service no longer sells them, it plans to allow existing ones to be usable for about 30 more days.
The greatest limitation (economic, editor’s note) of PlutoSphere was that it could not be distributed on the Meta Quest Store even theAppLab due to constraints imposed by Meta. Indeed, the latter only allows streaming of virtual reality content from “a device to which the customer has physical access”, specifically prohibiting broadcasting from “virtual devices or cloud sources”. So, PlutoSphere was distributed via SideQuest as an application to load in sideloading. This made access to the service more restrictive for users, requiring in particular to put the headset in developer mode, connect it to a PC and install the software SideQuest.
Jared Cheshier, co-founder and CEO of PlutoSphere, expressed frustration over the obstacles encountered due to the inability to distribute the service on the official Quest platform. Meta’s policies have restricted marketing strategies and limited PlutoSphere’s growth, resulting in an inability to honor commitments to AWS cloud service providers.
The closure of PlutoSphere was announced in a poignant statement where the team expressed regret and gratitude to users and the XR community. There she is :
After a long and intense period of negotiation and unforeseen challenges with a partner, it is with deep regret that we announce the cessation of PlutoSphere operations.
Although we strongly believe that spreading spatial computing use cases to autonomous devices is a necessary and exciting use case with a lot of potential, it is not possible to continue.
We are immediately closing the PlutoSphere service.Due to our inability to launch our application on the Meta Quest Store and grow our user base, we were unable to honor our commitments with our third-party cloud services reseller AWS.
Our journey with PlutoSphere has been unexpected and complex, full of obstacles. The lack of approval on the Meta appstore for our use case, effectively prohibiting streaming, has significantly hindered our marketing strategies, limited our growth, and prevented us from fulfilling our usage obligations. Despite concerted efforts to renegotiate our agreement for committed AWS services over the past year, we have reached a standstill.
We are now forced to close PlutoSphere. This involves discontinuing our products and services, reducing our workforce and initiating the liquidation process.
This result is far from what we envisioned when we began our cloud partnerships. We are responsible for signing a contract with commitments that were not respected, although it is surprising that we could not find a way to renegotiate. We have exhausted all avenues to avoid this situation and it is with a heavy heart that we share this news. We understand the impact this will have on our team, our users, and the broader XR community. We deeply apologize for any disappointment and inconvenience this may cause.
Your support and understanding during these difficult times is very important to us. Working on PlutoSphere has been an incredible journey, and it is with sadness that we come to its conclusion. We are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the XR landscape and will take lessons learned into future projects
In parallel with this closure, clues found in the headset firmware suggest that Meta is working on its own cloud-based virtual reality streaming service called Avalanche. If this project sees the light of day, it could raise questions about competition in the field of virtual reality.