Member-only story
A Return to Reality
Divesting from the Digital
VR really took off in 2016 with the commercial release of multiple hardware and software infrastructure like the Oculus Rift, Playstation VR and HTC Vive. Within a few years all of it got cheaper and smaller and — supposedly — more accessible. This was supposed to be the dawn of VR gaming, the Metaverse and a revolution in industry and medicine, allowing work to be done off site via the hardware. None of that happened.
In 2026 the much-trumpeted Metaverse has been shut down, there a few-to-no video games in development for VR systems and, with the Apple Vision priced at $3500, the hardware remains completely out of reach for the majority of consumers, especially given that it is a peripheral and not a processor. VR, once the brave new world and the future of the internet/computing/video games, has settled into being an impractical and over-priced niche product for the well-off.
It took slightly longer but the internet is losing its sheen at last too. Now that our entire existence is a subscription service for media we have no claim over and no personal curation of, there has been a surge in physical media sales with a 58% rise in CD sales in the first half of 2026. This is at the same time Playstation has announced it is stopping releasing any future games in a physical format. This had been coming for a long time…
