Meta’s lawyers successfully shut down VRPirates, which was by far the largest and most prominent source of pirated Quest VR games.
Often shortened as “VRP”, the group was cracking paid VR titles from the Meta Horizon Store, removing the entitlement check system, and distributing them for free. The group even has a desktop PC tool on GitHub, called Rookie Sideloader, which allowed users to easily browse and sideload a massive library of these cracked games to a connected Quest headset via USB or wireless ADB. Worse from a legal standpoint, the developers were accepting financial donations from fans.
VRPirates was responsible for the overwhelming majority of Quest game piracy, making it easy to illegally play standalone VR titles for free.
Earlier this month, Meta’s legal department issued VRPirates a formal DMCA takedown notice. According to VRPirates, Meta’s request made specific reference to Beat Saber, which it owns, making legal action highly likely to succeed if it ignored the notice.
“As much as I hate to say this, they’re well within their rights”, a VRPirates developer wrote on Reddit.
In response to Meta’s legal notice, VRPirates says it has “shut down” all its file hosting servers, and publicly declared that they will “never come back”. Further, it says it will no longer accept financial donations.
The Rookie Sideloader PC tool still allows you to sideload APKs you download yourself, just as the Meta Quest Developer Hub and SideQuest app do, but it throws an error when trying to access the VRPirates library of cracked content. It’s gone.
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“The rumors of the death of VR have been greatly exaggerated”, Meta declared at GDC 2026.
Multiple developers of popular paid singleplayer Quest games tell UploadVR that they’re elated with the news, and that their internal metrics suggest that piracy was a significant problem on Meta’s platform.
Of course, fighting digital piracy can often be a game of whack-a-mole. For now, the collapse of VRPirates has essentially eliminated the public Quest piracy scene. There was no real second place. But will another group emerge to take its place, or will the chilling effect of Meta’s legal takedown relegate Quest piracy to private spaces for the foreseeable future?
If you’re a Quest developer affected by piracy, let us know what you’ve been dealing with.
