I spent years quietly making flat games playable in VR. AI just handed that power to everyone.

RB — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 21:16:32 +0000

For most of the last decade, if you wanted to play a flat game in VR you had two options: wait for the official developer to do it, or hope a vr modder would do it.

Or if you were really ambitious and had a strong developer background you might try to build a mod yourself. That was me, I built a few of my favorite games mods myself. Everything from helping out with an updated 6dof motion controls of the excellent Outward, to working on shaders and control fixes in my favorite Zeldas through Dolphin, to a few of the loaders in the OpenMW version of Morrowind, or improved vr profiles for underrated indie games like Valley and Forgotten City. Plus a handful of others.

Every one of them was the same project — inject a driver, fake a headset, solve the camera, correct the scale, fight the shader compiler, attempt to get motion controls working (sometimes) then spend a weeks tuning until I didn't want to bounce between a compiler and a headset anymore. Some of them worked well. Most of them were tinkerer-only, and honestly that was the ceiling: the tooling existed, but it demanded specialist knowledge and a lot of patience.

That was the trade. VR mods were rare because making them was genuinely hard.

Then that stopped being true.

First UEVR cleaned up the injection mess that Praydog and the older tools (vorpX, Luke Ross, Vireio, etc) had been hacking around for years. Profiles became shareable. The auto-injector became a thing. A lot of the bespoke pain became a config file.

Then vibe coding changed who could do it at all. And this is the part I want to be careful about, because it's easy to overstate: AI does not make you a graphics programmer. But VR modding turns out to be a lot of mechanical, well-documented, trial-and-error work — camera offsets, hand tracking bindings, UI projection, control maps. The kind of work that used to demand a specific, rare skillset is now largely a matter of reading the docs and iterating with a model that can hold the whole context.

The result has been one of the fastest explosions of VR modding anyone alive has seen.

I don't say that as a guess. This year alone I watched, in no particular order: Titanfall 2, Max Payne 2, Doom Eternal (twice, two different modders), Red Dead Redemption, Mass Effect, Call of Duty MW2 Remastered, Halo 3, Spider-Man Remastered, Dark Souls II, Cyberpunk 2077, Crazy Taxi, Gran Turismo 2, Grid Legends, Trackmania, Forsaken, and a working Deus Ex and Witcher 3 build. Star Wars Galactic Racer shipped with day-one PCVR. That's not a hobby having a good year. That's a medium changing shape.

So the bottleneck moved.

It used to be can this be made? Now it's which of these is actually good, and what does it cost me to get it running? Those are completely different questions, and the second one is where almost all the coverage fails you.

Because here's what finding a VR mod actually looks like right now. The announcement is a tweet thread. The mod is a Patreon post, or a GitHub release, or a Nexus page, or a Discord message the author links in the replies. The setup is a YouTube video that assumes you already know what a profile is. And the crucial detail — is this a 10-minute install or a four-hour config nightmare, and does it induce motion sickness — is almost never stated anywhere. You find out yourself, at 1am, by doing it.

If you follow individual modders closely, that's fine. You know who ships things that work. But nobody can follow all of them now. The scene got too big, too fast.

That's the gap, so a few gaming media friends and I started a vr mod database site with reviews, setup, guides, and links to the mods at a new project called CompoundVR.

The site is a decision database for flat-to-VR: for every major game, the best available route, the setup burden, the comfort and performance tradeoffs, and an honest verdict on whether it's worth your time. My gaming media buddies Robert runs the editorial side, Ian is a freelance writer and gaming enthusiast and holds the standard from a content and gamer point of view. I work the technical layer — what the mods actually are, how they interact, what breaks.

It started as my own notes, honestly. I was tired of re-researching the same games every time a new mod landed. Then the scene tripled and the notes stopped being enough.

The uncomfortable part is that I'm now on both sides of this. I still make mods, and I also get asked constantly which ones to play. Those are in tension: the person who wants you to try their mod and the person who wants to tell you it's a four-hour setup are not the same instinct. I try to keep them honest with each other. Where I've made something, the page says so. Where a competitor's mod is better, the page says that too.

Something I'd genuinely like from the community: what's the flat games you most wish to play in VR? And what VR mods have came out recently that are on your back log? Not the one with the best trailer — the one nobody can figure out whether it's worth the install. That list is a better use of time for me to focus on, then any vr mod that I would code from scratch.

DEV Community: RB

I spent years quietly making flat games playable in VR. AI just handed that power to everyone.