Way back in October 2021, Meta announced a wild idea: it was going to port GTA: San Andreas, one of the most-acclaimed open world games of all time, to Meta Quest VR devices. At the time, details were very scarce, and there were also few updates in the years following the announcement. Now, we finally have more news about San Andreas for VR – and unfortunately, it’s not good.
As first reported by IGN, work on the GTA: San Andreas VR port has been put “on hold indefinitely.” A spokesperson has confirmed the Meta team is now focussed on “other projects,” with hopes for “working with [their] friends at Rockstar in the future.”
Given there has never been any official footage of this planned San Andreas VR port, it’s safe to assume there was no significant development progress before the project was put on hold. That’s despite Meta calling it a project “many years in the making” in a blog post that followed the game’s announcement.
All that said, the news is fairly unsurprising, particularly given the recent struggles of Meta’s VR division. In 2023 alone, this division reportedly lost USD $16 billion. It also reportedly lost USD $13.7 billion in 2022, following a loss of USD $10.2 billion in 2021.
Despite the Meta Quest headsets representing the top of the line for approachable consumer VR tech, it appears this business has been wildly unprofitable, and that development work has been rescoped accordingly. In August 2024, Meta actually shut down one of its bigger VR-focussed game studios, Ready at Dawn, after making preliminary cuts in April 2023.
Read: Meta lost $14 billion on VR and metaverse projects in 2022
The reality is that consumer adoption for VR is still relatively low, and it’s likely for this reason that Meta’s VR division has suffered.
GTA: San Andreas for VR devices could have reversed some of that fortune, likely garnering much attention on the popularity of the GTA name – but it does appear Meta is not pouring any more resources into making that a reality, for now. An “indefinite” delay does not mean the project is outright cancelled, but it does seem very unlikely that Meta will continue work with such a complex atmosphere around VR games.
Those looking forward to a new GTA game will just have to wait for GTA 6 to release in 2025, as it now seems the dream of GTA: San Andreas VR is over. We expect this project to become another lost opportunity, in a year of many.
