Yes, they implemented that organisational change quite a long time ago, although from the feedback in this thread, so far, it didn’t appear to do much to improve the quality of the sim, from a VR-user perspective.
Live Dev Q&A - May 25th, 2022 - Microsoft Flight Simulator / News and Announcements - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums do a CTRL&F for “VR” and you will see what Martial had to say about the change.
So, it’s just any other feature they have but low priority because only 10-15% use VR…
Nice, this is one of the features, alongside weather and atc that they should be looking to be fixed/improved asap but, like he said, priorities…
He also said
He also mentions the particular difficulty in reproducing VR bugs, and as a developer myself if you can’t reproduce a bug it’s extremely difficult to find and fix.
Everybody wants their pain point fixed now, but there’s a lot of them all being worked on to varying degrees. It’s a complex machine, sometimes things need to be done in sequence as well, in order to fix other elements. Fixing the base issues will translate through to a better VR experience at some point as well.
Often when you don’t have a dedicated team (or even person) for something, then quality will very quickly slip as everyone ends up with other things they have to prioritise and nobody takes responsibility (Not saying that’s definitely the case here, but maybe)
10-15% of players is quite high, and as I wrote previously I expect it is only going up as hardware prices come down and more people experience VR at a friend’s house or exhibition - but I doubt VR has got anything like 10-15% of dev attention! From my anecdotal experience I expect there’s quite a lot of users who play MSFS very occasionally, or just wanted to check out the graphics and find their house - whereas the 10-15% using VR are more likely to be more invested and long term supporters of the hobby, surely it makes sense to keep them on board. I hope they can give a little attention to VR soon.
This quote is from Jorg:
I feel this statement is not quite accurate.
There are no topics at all that 100% of users are seriously concerned about. Even with topics like performance, there are many people who state they are happy with the current situation.
Most of the topics discussed in each live stream are only of interest to a minority of users. Not everyone wants to fly study-level airliners (though I must admit I do).
Similarly with many of the topics under “Active Development” (e.g. windsocks, logbook).
So playing down VR as only a minority interest as they did was a bit disappointing. While I accept they need to prioritise, it would be good if they could at least not put VR at the bottom of the queue, which is roughly where it seems to be at the moment.
I wonder if Jorg has used VR in anything other than MSFS, as even though he appears to be a fan, it could be that he has missed out on what has been done in other offerings and not just flight sims?
Speaking as a developer this is my interpretation.
When there is a dedicated VR team they will work on making VR better. But as other teams add new features then they will sometimes be broken in VR, but since that’s the VR team’s job it’ll add workload to the VR team that will be constantly fixing VR, always behind the curve, eventually they may not be able to keep up.
So Asobo disband the VR team, give everyone VR headsets and tell everyone that they must test and make sure their features operate correctly in VR. This is the reasoning they gave the first time. Now new features get VR as a first class item, VR doesn’t keep breaking and trying to catch up again. This is good.
But the catch is that there’s no VR team any more, so VR specific enhancements go into the backlog of other teams and have to wait for prioritisation against all of the other work. Given the number of players affected clearly not much VR dedicated work will happen.
That sounds like a very good assessment of how Asobo now appear to handle VR and the best conclusion, from our point of view at least, would be that a VR team should be recreated. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be a big team, as if there is a “VR Champion”, for want of a better name, at a high level (Jorg maybe), that should ensure a higher level of priority to VR for all of the teams.
Was a very interesting dev Q&A. I am of the “If you build it they will come” camp. If MSFS can consistently strive to embrace the cutting edge of available tech, such as DLSS & FSR (already done), DirectStorage (Needs to be seriously investigated, there is potential for huge benefits here) and be pushing forward VR performance and interface improvements, especially hand and eye tracking, this could easily be the “Crysis” of sims.
There is a general market attraction and quiet “bragging rights” bonus that comes from being the clear and obvious leader in the areas of graphical fidelity and implementation of the most modern tech, especially on PC, and all of those benefits eventually filter down to console. When that happens many will come just for the icing, to see what is graphically possible at the bleeding edge, but some of those will stay to enjoy the rest of the cake… the core part, which is the joy of flight.
I maintain that VR, and everything that supports it and enhances it, is the inevitable future of simming, and given that the hardware is finally very nearly there for all aspects of civilian flight… now is the time to really get in front of it and show what can be done.
The Quest 2 has some stunning games, and a lot of variety.
I’m just waiting for someone to develop a pair of gloves that would allow the hands to feel virtual objects, like yokes, throttles, switches, knobs etc. That way the user could be placed into a virtual cockpit that they could actually touch and feel.
I know, it might sound a bit far-fetched, but one can dream. 
Yup, I’m still using a CV1, so have access to the “Oculus” library, although looking to upgrade very soon. I’m not certain that I want to go further down the Meta route, but we’ll see. 
10-15% suggests it is not profitable, I can understand not pursuing it from a business perspective.
However, Zuckerberg clearly finds it sufficiently profitable.
If profit were all that ever really mattered, I wonder how much profit space x is currently generating.
At least we now know that there is no more dedicated VR team working on development in this area. Sad to hear that really, considering that there is so much interest in VR. If performance will be better on lower specs hardware in particular, that 10-15% might double up for sure.
There hasn’t been a dedicated VR team for about a year now. That link I posted was to a video that was posted in May last year.
Clearly they have to have some mechanism of prioritising development, and the feedback snapshot and voting on bugs is it.
At the same time they understand that VR specific threads can not compete for votes with universal threads, so they rely on the community folks to bring any major VR problems to their attention.
Therefore a VR specific problem being brought to their attention has to now be slotted in amidst the naturally prioritised universal stuff.
So they’ve actually made it more difficult for themselves to manage and prioritise BOTH universal and VR issues.
Here you have a situation where a community manager must fight the case to get a VR issue on the list, and then a dev has to fight the case to get the dev time to work on it.
I bet it was exactly this messy setup that led to them creating a dedicated VR team in the first place, then the VR team quickly discovered that without a stupid amount of different headsets and hardware they couldn’t reproduce half bugs being reported.
So the real problem at the root of all this isn’t that only 10-15% of MSFS users are using VR - its that 10-15% of MSFS users are using any single combination of headset, connectivity (could be usb, wireless etc), third party software, settings for resolution, smoothing, then you have it acting differently between Win10 and Win11, AMD and Nvidia and so on and so on.
On top of that you have to realise that each user arrived at his or her specific combination after months (years?) of tweaking and experimenting.
So how the hell can any organisation effectively reproduce, capture or test for any of this? That is the state of PC VR, it’s a big sprawling mess.
It’s a miracle that what we have works as it does right now.
But there are some regressions which I am sure everyone using VR, whichever headset and hardware, experiences. No need for a deep investigation. Just make a short flight from C&D to C&D and you will see.
The engine-off-panel-jump-away being one and the toolbar-app-scaling-bug introduced by SU12 being another one. These have not been with us from the beginning of VR but have been introduced during development and should be taken care of as soon as possible, IMHO. (Honestly, most of the devs found workarounds now for #2, but eating away their development time).
That toolbar app scaling issue was surely not something that the new VR-inclusive structure should have allowed, as presumably, one of the multitude of VR headsets lying around the office should have been used to test out the changes, before release?
They aren’t testing anything in VR, because none of them are going to sit there for 6 months getting a reasonably well working installation of MSFS in VR, with all the tweaks in place and all the tools installed.
It’s a chicken and the egg scenario.
If people don’t find vr easily accessible they will give up. I’ve found it extremely difficult to access, it’s taken me 3 days to get my first flight.
It needs a dedicated headset from Microsoft for pc and Xbox. Without that accessibility is difficult for many, 10-15% will not be improved on.