I wanted to share with you some news I’ve recently received about NeosVR, a social VR platform I’ve written about frequently on this blog in the past (here are links to all my previous blog posts along with this one).
On September 21, 2023, development team member Veer posted the following message on the NeosVR Discord server:
Hello everyone.
The Neos development team has been negotiating with Karel Hulec for months to resolve the conflict at the heart of the current development freeze. Unfortunately, we are here today to announce that the negotiations failed to produce an agreement satisfactory to both sides.
Karel Hulec recently listed several members of the development team as contributors to a new project called “Neos Foundation” on the Neos Wiki. None of the listed team members have been contacted at any point regarding listing their names on the Neos Wikis, and none of them have agreed to work with Mr. Karel Hulec on the Neos Foundation or any other project.
After negotiations, on April 24, 2023, due to increasing difficulties in building the trust necessary to continue the partnership with Karel Hulec, Frooxius resigned from his position at Solirax LTD. As we can no longer find a path to successful reconciliation, the rest of our development team, including the leaders of our moderation and quality control teams, content teams, and support teams, are now officially resigning from our roles as part of this community.
We know that this has been an extremely frustrating time for some members of our community, as the lack of updates and communication from the development team has created uncertainty about the future of your project and Neos as a platform. I apologize for my silence. This was due to the legal advice we received and our efforts to keep the ongoing dispute resolution as professional as possible. Unfortunately, we were unable to find an agreement that would allow us to continue working with the Neos community. The disagreements we had with Mr. Karel Hulec were too extensive and important to allow compromise. His actions and lack of professionalism undermined any opportunity to resolve our differences. I hope you continue to create great projects wherever those efforts take you in the future.
We understand that you may have many questions about the development team, but our presence on this Discord server will be limited in the future as it takes away our place within the Neos community. Inquiries about individuals previously on the team should be sent via direct message or other private channels.
On October 7, 2023, Veer posted:
Hello everyone, Since there is no longer any moderation management for this informal disagreement, we will be closing the channel to prevent further communication. This is to prevent unmoderated discourse from making our servers unsafe for users, projects or brands, or other entities.
We take this to mean that the NeosVR Discord is now officially closed and you can’t actually post messages to any of the channels anymore. (If for no other reason than historical purposes, I hope this feud continues.)
This marks the end of a decade and a long period of uncertainty about the future of the project. Many people may not realize that NeosVR’s roots go back to 2014. Comenius’ world (You can read more about it here, one of what was originally intended to be a multi-part series of blog posts about the history of NeosVR. Unfortunately, I never got around to completing it due to my full-time job as an academic librarian.)
We wish everyone involved with NeosVR good luck in their future endeavors!
VR expert ThrillSeeker details NeosVR’s problems in a 20-minute YouTube video from last year.
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