Image via Insomniac Games/Oculus.
Various Oculus Rift games from developer Insomniac Games appear to have been delisted from the Meta store, and without any fanfare from the studio.
Journalist Dominic Tarason first spotted the delistings, noting the titles were "big, high-budget PC VR games" only available for the virtual reality device. According to him, the impacted titles include 2016's The Unspoken, Edge of Nowhere, and Feral Rites, and 2019's Stormland. When he contacted Meta for an explanation, the customer support told him to "ask Insomniac."
At time of writing, the studio itself has not issued a public statement on the matter. In a reply, Tarason believed the delistings happened "some time ago," but their being unavailable to purchase went generally unnoticed. "Others are so thoroughly vanished that not even pirate and torrent sites seem to have the rest anymore," he said. "That's kinda scary, considering that Insomniac are a high-profile triple-A studio."
Before it was acquired by PlayStation and making Marvel games, Insomniac put Ratchet & Clank aside to work on several original titles. The most recognizable were Fuse and Sunset Overdrive, but the developer also made phone games (Fruit Fusion, Digit & Dash) and metroidvanias (Song of the Deep). Its handful of VR titles came out during this experimental phase, and it hasn't dabbled with the technology since, not even to port any of its more recent works to either PlayStation VR system.
The four VR games were all published by Oculus Studios, which has previously teamed with other prominent non-VR developers like Turtle Rock Studios and Gunfire Games. It's also purchased Sanzaru Games and the late Ready at Dawn, both of which previously worked on spinoffs for PlayStation franchises Ratchet & Clank and God of War.
Insomniac's apparent silence on these games' disappearance also underlines the need for a widespread preservation effort for the medium. If studios are unable to speak on their games going away for whatever reason, the titles deserve to be archived at the very least.
