Phasmophobia Standalone Quest Version Currently Not Planned, Though “Never Say Never”
Just last week, Kinetic Games released their acclaimed online cooperative horror title, Phasmophobia, on the Xbox Series, PS5, and PSVR2. While the additional platforms introduced a wave of new players, one thing that many thought was rather strange was the absence of another VR platform, Quest VR. Well, Kinetic Games has a reason for that, and it all has to do with optimization and how small the studio is currently to take on a port.
Kinetic Games Is Aware of the Demand for a Quest Port of Phasmophobia
Speaking to Videogamer in an interview, Phasmophobia developer Ben Lavender revealed that the team is fully aware of the demand for a native, standalone Quest port. However, to do so, the team would have to allocate a ton of resources to make sure it works and is optimized for the headsets, resources they just don’t have at the moment.
“We have seen the demand for it definitely,” Lavender explained. “I think the biggest challenge for us in terms of supporting standalone hardware is what’s normally a quality thing is kind of relevant to our game mechanics. So, what I mean by that, is, like, the lights in the room like you can turn them on and off dynamically. So, that in itself makes the game quite expensive especially on a headset or a Switch or an older- gen PlayStation console or Xbox console.”
Though there are no current plans, the studio isn’t against revisiting it later, citing the old adage, “Never say never,” especially with Quest 3 now out.
“To be honest, it’s not something we’ve looked at for the [Quest] 3 specifically because we’ve been very busy running around with everything else currently,” Lavender explained. “But, yes, you know, it might get to a point where it’s feasible to have on a standalone headset whether it’s the 3 whether it’s whatever is after that. But right now like with our team size being so small especially we don’t have a massive amount of hands to kind of go around and try these things, unfortunately.”
Despite releasing on the PSVR2 and being a more niche headset than the Quest, development on that port was likely “easier” since the developers were already working on the PS5 port of the game. It’s something that they could work on at the same time without expending a massive amount of work to do so.
Here’s hoping to see a standalone Phasmophobia port for the Quest sometime down the road. It only makes sense, at least to me, to do one, given just how popular Phasmophobia has been.
Phasmophobia is now available on the Xbox Series and PS5, along with the PC version.
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