Playmaker Support Officially Cancelled

Stuff like Lakuza’s boss fights will become more common with Playmaker. Picture by Lakuza.

This week’s biggest discussions are all about Playmaker and the announcement VRChat presented to their community on Discord, and the chaotic reaction they received certainly got mixed results.

According to the latest post on their Medium page, VRChat admitted that “it was determined that Playmaker wasn’t the correct direction for VRChat to take,” but it doesn’t mean we’re not getting our tools for custom scripting. “Instead, we have taken it upon ourselves to create a custom, powerful, VRChat-authored toolkit, free of cost.”

The tool they’re preparing is called “Node Graph,” although the name may get changed, and it works in a similar way to Playmaker, except this one is fully custom-made and it’s completely free.

However, not everyone is happy about the announcement. One of the biggest issues with the recent drama involves reactions of disappointed users who purchased Playmaker after VRChat mentioned that the asset was on sale in “Announcements,” which eventually convinced people to buy Playmaker for $30. “I knew they were cancelling the use of Playmaker for ages, but, sadly, not long enough to prevent me from buying it,” Ravencroft said. “My sadness is strong today.”

TCL, one of our regular users, explained what happened, “Playmaker was announced before the population exploded in the fall of last year, it was supposed to have been worked on months ago, but things changed when the population skyrocketed and it got shelved so the devs could focus on keeping the servers running. They finally managed to get back to Playmaker recently, and tried a beta, found it wasn't what they needed now, and decided to do it themselves.”

As Ron said on behalf of the VRChat team, the decision wasn’t easy to make. It wasn’t something they wanted, but that’s the best option out there.

Later, he added, “In summary, this is the best way forward for team and you guys, straight up. It's something I’d rather use as a creator too.” Also, he said, “If I didn't believe that, I would not have allowed it to occur.”