JanusVR Shuts Down Its Corporation, But the Platform Will Continue

JanusVR CEO and co-founder James McCrae posted a letter to the JanusVR subReddit, announcing that the company behind JanusVR is shutting down:

I write to inform the broader community of our intent to dissolve the corporation, Janus VR, Inc., at the end of Q4 2019. It is no longer feasible to maintain our corporation status in Canada and the US given the expenses this will incur each year (as it relates to legal, accounting, patent/IP filings, etc.)

It’s not all sad news. I remain committed to do all I can to maintain our existing services and underlying infrastructure that the community enjoys, such as our default presence server, build servers and our Vesta hosting service. While I would love to see a sub-community emerge around supporting essential Janus services such that it would be self-sufficient, with an appointed group of custodians, it is my intention to take this on as a personal expense in the interim.

I think I speak for everyone on the team when I say we take great pride in what we have built as a result of our interaction with you, our community, over the past five years. A fact some may find surprising is that Janus VR has had hundreds of thousands of unique users since it was created. It is an incredible feeling to have built something that captured such attention and delighted so many people, or at least introduced them to our unique interpretation of the “immersive web” – even if that vision was a little “early”, “different” or “ahead of its time”. 

You can read the letter in full here. The open source JanusVR project will continue (here is the guide and GitHub), maintained by a cadre of volunteers. One commenter on the RyanSchultz.com Discord said:

It’s a shame they had to close down, but not surprising… They had no viable business model. None of these VR organizations seem to be trying the nonprofit route, even though it has worked out well for the Blender foundation. Maybe Blender is just an anomaly, though.

Thanks to Jin for the heads up!

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