Pico cans its competitor to Beat Saber and fires its entire developer team, as layoffs continue

The Pico brand isn’t that infamous here in the west, where the Quest 2 was the king of the best VR headset lists up until recently. Of course, today the Quest 3 has taken up the crown, but even now: the Pico 4 isn’t at all a bad piece of hardware.

And you know what? That made me hopeful that a successor to the headset, as Pico did say that it has plans to share a roadmap for future projects really soon. Unfortunately, that never happened and now the Bytedance-owned company seems to be in peril.

Yeah, layoffs always suck. And in the case of Pico, they are reportedly in the hundreds and may have even reached the thousandth mark. Days since that report broke, the situation appears to have become even more unstable as now an entire development team has been fired.



So, Pico had gathered together a pretty large team with a single, albeit challenging task: create a game that could compete with Beat Saber. The result was an in-house title that utilized proprietary external trackers to make things a bit more complicated and more fun. Check out the trailer above if you’d like to see what I mean.

The result is this entertaining blend of Beat Saber and Dance Dance Revolution that certainly has the potential of becoming a VR hit. I don’t think that it could defeat Beat Saber — it’s way too easy to get into and doesn’t require any proprietary hardware, but I don’t see any reasons why the two can’t coexist in a neatly competitive manner.

But then, on November 7, Pico officialized things: everyone involved in the project was fired and Blitz Rhythm was canceled. While the said source has remained anonymous for the time being, they did share another interesting bit of insight:

All of this is — allegedly — happening because Bytedance no longer sees a profitable future in virtual reality, and is hence reshaping Pico solely into a VR headset manufacturer.

Huh. An odd statement if anything, right? If there is no profit in the business, why shift to focus on production of the things that enable said business? Especially in the light of recent reports of Meta and Tencent collaborating to do the very same thing.

Well, after all: this is basically just a rumor at this point, so it’s best to take it with a grain of salt.

The entire situation with Pico is really odd and we’ll need a lot more information to surface before we can say that we’ve put all the pieces together. But one thing is for sure: it sucks for all of this creative talent to have just gone to waste, completely out of the blue.