Foo Fighters made their VR debut inside Horizon Venues last night, but the Meta Quest concert doesn’t appear to have gone quite as planned.
The band had pre-recorded a 40-minute video performance that ran inside the app and in browsers following the Super Bowl. If you were joining in Venues, you would in theory get to hang out with friends as your Meta avatar whilst watching the performance on an enormous screen.
But based on our own experiences and many comments around the web, the experience didn’t run smoothly for a lot of people.
1/ THREAD covering the @Meta Quest Foo Fighters concert in VR, which had a horrible onboarding experience, the lobby crashed, & LOTS of people could not get in (see responses below).
This pre-recorded concert started at 8:05p but Horizon Venues didn’t even open until 8p & crashed https://t.co/qqgNgQBKh8 pic.twitter.com/JYtCxncP3w— Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) February 14, 2022
As Kent Bye of Voices of VR wrote on Twitter, the Venues experience only opened at 8pm PST, the exact time the show was scheduled to begin. This caused a lot of confusion for people trying to figure out where to head in the build up to the concert, and the band’s recording started five minutes after doors opened.
When the event did launch, it seemed to be popular – Bye’s image shows over 10,000 people looking to watch the show.
Problematically, though, many people couldn’t get into the experience at all. That includes UploadVR’s own Harry Baker, who tried for half an hour past the event’s starting time but got nowhere after repeatedly pressing the ‘Join’ button.
Anyone else having trouble joining the Foo Fighters event on Horizon Venues?
— Harry Baker (@hjbaker_) February 14, 2022
Responses to Harry’s tweet below suggest lots of people were having similar issues. There’s even Reddit threads about how users couldn’t join the experience. Venues did, at least, repeat the experience again a few hours later for those that missed it (and stuck with it) the first time around.
Horizon VP Vivek Sharma also responded to Harry’s tweet, citing “unprecedented” demand as the reason for the issues. These issues came about in the middle of Meta’s big advertising push for its social Horizon apps, which it sees as a foundation for a future metaverse. The push included a live action spot during the Super Bowl that saw Quest 2 headsets rebranded from Oculus to the company’s new name.
If you did get into the show you were treated to a 10-song set with some rare tracks.
Were you able to make it into the Horizon Venues Foo Fighters concert? If so, what do you make of it? Let us know in the comments below!
