Beat Saber screenshot of the player slashing boxes

At its core, Beat Saber is an incredibly simple VR game. It's all about listening to your favorite music and smashing boxes with lightsabers, which you wouldn't think would be all that addictive, but is actually strangely captivating and quite relaxing if you can accept having sore arms afterwards!

Because of this, Beat Saber has managed to achieve a great deal of success in the VR scene, so much so that Facebook's Oculus has now decided to acquire both it and its developer Beat Games. According to the press release, Beat Games will continue operating as an independent studio, while all of the currently planned Beat Saber updates and features will be arriving as expected.

While I have no doubts that Beat Games will continue operating as normal, I am somewhat worried about Beat Saber's modding scene. While Beat Saber was a niche indie game it was easy for it to get away with things like custom songs, but now that Facebook's name is all over it, I can't imagine that some of the copyright-infringing mods will remain active for long. And for a game that's all about the music, having an extremely limited selection of licensed music would be pretty darn devastating.

"We’re going to do our best to preserve the value that mods bring to the Beat Saber player base," explains the announcement post. "As a reminder, our most recent policy updates give more clarity to how developer mode is intended to be used, such as helping developers build their apps or for enthusiasts to explore new concepts. It is not intended for engaging in piracy or illicit modding, including mods that infringe on third-party IP rights or contain malicious code."

So whatever the future may bring, it'll certainly be interesting to follow Beat Saber's evolution moving forward. There is still a lot of room for it to grow, and I can only hope Facebook and Beat Games will managed to find a way to improve things while keeping the core of Beat Saber's experience intact.