Rec Room shutting down. Survios getting wiped out. Horizon Worlds walking out of VR for good in June, after Meta had already tried it once and backed off. A Township Tale going dark in the same week three other studios did. Hyper Dash putting a date on its own ending in November. Every one of those pieces sent me looking for the same answer, which is what happens to the people who are still logged in when somebody turns the lights off, and every one of them arrived at the same place. Not much. Sorry.
Then last week a studio in Austin announced a mini golf course.
Gloop Lair lands August 13. The pitch is a once-peaceful 90s metropolis whose entire water supply has been turned into hazardous villainous gloop, a sentence I enjoyed typing considerably more than I expected to. It is the fifth entry in the Evil Lairs series, following Laser Lair in 2023, Ice Lair and 8-Bit Lair in 2024, and Crystal Lair last year. It is the fourth of six courses Mighty Coconut has planned for 2026. And by the running count it is course number 41 since Walkabout Mini Golf launched on Quest on September 24, 2020.
Forty-one courses. Put that number next to my obituary folder and tell me which one is the anomaly here.
Run the arithmetic yourself
Mighty Coconut published a five-year retrospective last September, and the numbers in it are faintly ridiculous for a game about knocking a ball into a cup. 23,004,672 hours played. 43,365,815 sessions. Two billion putts. 1,332 holes across the catalog with more than 650 balls hidden inside them, and over 40 commemorative putters to collect on the way. Players in more than 40 countries. A slot as the 20th best-selling title in the history of the Meta Quest store.
The one I keep circling back to is this: more than 55 percent of VR sessions are multiplayer. Think about how odd that is in a medium where the overwhelming majority of what gets funded is one person alone in a room holding a gun, where every studio deck since 2016 has promised social presence as the killer feature and the thing that would finally make VR stick, and where the game that actually delivered it at scale turned out to be a low-poly mini golf sim from a studio most people outside VR have never heard of. Steam has it at 97 percent positive across more than 2,700 reviews. The Quest store has it past 13,000.
That retrospective counted 37 courses. Tiki a Coco arrived in January. Hollywood in March. Blokhaven on May 7. Gloop Lair next Thursday takes it to 41, and none of those gaps ran longer than a couple of months, and not once in six years has anyone at that studio published a post about the roadmap being reevaluated.
It also runs on Quest, SteamVR, PSVR2, Pico, Samsung’s Galaxy XR, and as a flatscreen Pocket Edition on iOS. It is in Meta’s Horizon+ catalog and it has been through PS Plus. When a platform shows up, Walkabout shows up on it.
They raised the price and gave content away in the same breath
Here is the decision that convinced me this is the best-managed game in VR, and it is not a golf course at all.
On May 1, 2025, the base price of Walkabout Mini Golf went from $14.99 to $24.99. Ten dollars more for a game that had already been out nearly five years. In that same announcement, six courses people had been buying separately, Sweetopia and Laser Lair and Shangri-La and Upside Town and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Alfheim, were folded into the base game. Everyone who already owned it got all six free. Quest+ and PS Plus subscribers got them too.
The stated reason was that “the amount of DLC has started to dwarf the main content.”
