If you’re a regular reader of Road to VR you’ll notice the site just got a huge facelift. I’m excited to introduce this new version of Road to VR, the first major revision to our humble publication in a decade.
I have to hand it to our old site. Although it evolved over the years, the foundation was technically the same server and layout that launched all the way back in 2015. It wasn’t perfect, but it did the job for far longer than it should have reasonably been asked to. But the future, as they say, is now. I’m happy to finally introduce Road to VR 5.0, and to tell you a little bit about the goals that guided its design.
At a high level, Road to VR 5.0 aims to achieve the following:
- Fully responsive – In the past, the mobile experience on our site felt like a second-class citizen to the desktop experience. With 5.0, there is no longer a ‘desktop’ and ‘mobile’ version of the site, instead everyone can access the same unified content stream no matter what device they’re using.
- Cleaner – made to take advantage of the larger screen real estate and higher resolutions than what was common in 2015 (when the prior layout was conceived).
- Better organized – a clearer system of content organization made to serve readers rather than search engines. Check out the site’s Menu to explore content based on the topics that are most relevant to you.
- Faster and more capable – the new version loads faster and has a much more modern foundation, allowing us to make tweaks and improvements far more easily than before.
- Ready for the future – our new server infrastructure gives Road to VR massive headroom for growing our readership and enables a number of planned features that are still to come.
For the Power Users
While I’m very pleased with the look and feel of the new site, I know not everyone will prefer the more spacious layout. Sometimes you just want to power through the latest content with minimal distractions. If that sounds like you, I encourage you to check out the Power Feed. This is a chronological feed of the latest content, with a greater density of articles in the same space.
You can access the Power Feed directly or by clicking the ‘Latest’ header on the front page.
For even more control over how you read the content we publish, I’d like to remind everyone that they can subscribe to our full content RSS feed in their favorite reader. And a little pro-tip for the RSS-enlightened among us: you can subscribe to individual sections of our site by adding /feed/ to the end of any section URL from the site’s Menu. For example, if you want a feed of only our game reviews, you can find it at https://.com/sections/xr-game-review-preview-software/feed/. Or if you want a feed of only PC VR related news, you can find it at https://.com/sections/pc-vr-news-reviews/feed/.
Feedback Welcome
Road to VR 5.0 launched with some rough edges. Thanks to community feedback, many of those have already been sanded down. But the work isn’t done; carrying over more than 10,000 articles and nearly 50GB of media that we’ve published over more than a decade was never going to be easy, and I’m sure some things have been missed or aren’t behaving as intended.
I welcome feedback from anyone who spots bugs, rough edges, or has suggestions for improvements. Feel free to reach out to feedback [at] .com. If you are reporting a specific issue, it would be a huge help if you’d also include a screenshot, the device you’re using, and the browser version.
A Look Back
2026 marks 15 years since Road to VR was first launched. So much has changed in that time, but a little visual history goes a long way:
A Look Ahead
What’s ahead for both Road to VR and the XR industry at large, I believe, is certainly much more exciting than what’s behind. The industry is in a cooling period right now, but it’s not the first we’ve seen, and it won’t be the last. What’s actually driving the cooling period is a transition that’s happening quietly at first, but will be loud before we know. The combination of the world’s biggest tech companies (Meta, Google, and Apple) vying for the next phase of XR, and a shift toward lighter and more comfortable form-factors for head-worn devices, is going to take the industry to the next level. With Road to VR 5.0, we’re poised to bring you the very latest on that future, as it happens.
Business Updates & Recognition
As it was when we started back in 2011, Road to VR continues to be a completely independent publication with no outside investors.
Back in 2017 we partnered with media company Gamer Network to run our ad operations (with a contractual obligation that it would not get involved in the editorial side of our business). Gamer Network was sold to IGN back in 2024, and at the time we amicably ended our partnership. Since then we returned to managing our ad operations internally, while maintaining the same firewall between ads and editorial that has guided us from the very beginning. So this is technically old news, but worth putting on the record for the sake of transparency. And hey, maybe someone can finally update the Gamer Network Wikipedia entry so Road to VR is no longer listed under the ‘Partnered’ section of their page. After 15 years, we still don’t have our own Wikipedia page….
Road to VR wouldn’t be here after all these years without the passion and dedication of our small team. I want to give a special thanks to Scott Hayden, our longstanding Editor. Scott is a powerhouse of a reporter who I knew I could trust to hold down the fort while I focused on getting this new version of Road to VR out the door. It simply wouldn’t have been possible without his talent and dedication. And I want to thank my co-founder Paul James who is the mastermind and maintainer behind the technical infrastructure that kept Road to VR running smoothly for the last decade.
