Source: Insomniac Games / Oculus Studios
Earlier today, YouTuber VR Nathaniël de Jong (aka Nathie) noticed that Stormlands is no longer available in the Oculus Store. One of my favorite Quest 2 games, Stormlands is developed by Insomniac Games, which made Oculus Games before joining Playstation Studios. The developer’s other Oculus Store game, The Unspoken, has also been discontinued.
So it looks like Stormland has been removed from the Oculus Store. You can no longer buy it but you can confirm that you can install it. The contract with Insomniac Games may have expired, or they did it because the servers became a ghost town. Thanks @MartinRisbyVR for the warning! pic.twitter.com/RP3lHLrBLJ
NathieVR 6 janvier 2022
The timing of this removal initially raised eyebrows, given Sony’s impending return to virtual reality. The company announced the PSVR 2, the next generation of virtual reality glasses, during its presentation at CES earlier this week. Since Sony owns the rights to all of Insomniac’s intellectual property, it is not excluded that Sony and PlayStation may remove Insomniac games from competitors’ storefronts in order to carry them and repost them on their storefronts.
However, Meta has stopped these rumors. When we reached out to the company for comment, they replied, “Stormland is back in store after completing a data protection assessment, which you can read more about on our blog starting in September.” The company then linked to a blog post in September detailing a new process developers must follow in order to keep their game in the Oculus storefront.
The Meta comment didn’t say if Stormland was removed because Insomniac had not completed a data protection assessment by the deadline, or if the game had stalled during the assessment.
It’s safe to say Insomniac may never publish new experiences on the Oculus Store. The acquisition of Sony has apparently killed Insomniac’s Xbox-exclusive franchise, Sunset Overdrive. Since the acquisition, Sony and Insomniac have largely stayed silent on radio on any supplemental projects, although Insomniac’s creative director Marcus Smith said “nothing is stopping” the studio from developing another Sunset. Overdrice in an interview with GQ. But the original is still available on Game Pass and the Microsoft Store, at least.
Although Stormland is owned by Sony through Insomniac, Oculus Studios acts as the game’s publisher, so licensing agreements may prevent Sony from removing it without Oculus’ consent. Otherwise, the two VR rivals will likely have a good reason to have fun together.
The Oculus Quest 2 sold in droves in its first year, thanks to its wireless simplicity and high-quality, exclusive offerings. In the meantime, PSVR 2 will be based on PS5-connected connectivity, offering bigger exclusives like Horizon Call of the Mountain and better graphics.
We speculated that Quest’s success might hurt PSVR 2, given Meta’s acquisition of more VR studios and a cheaper VR entry point. We don’t know yet how Sony’s new console will stack up against the Quest Pro and Quest 3.
Given all this, Sony may want to port older games like Stormland to PSVR 2 to boost its launch library. Especially if the theoretical Stormland port takes advantage of PSVR 2’s unique features and sees some visual improvements. But if Oculus had exclusive rights, that might not happen.
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