SideQuest acquired the Altspace name and is rebuilding the social VR platform for a fall 2026 relaunch—robots included—after Microsoft shut the original down on March 10, 2023.
Fall is no longer a distant calendar label. On altvr.app, SideQuest’s teaser site still reads Coming Fall 2026. That window opens in days. The company is not restoring Microsoft’s servers. It is shipping a new client under a name it bought, aimed at the version of Altspace that actually worked: live events, meetups, and user-created spaces—the 2016–2017 shape, not the late enterprise experiment.
What SideQuest actually bought
SideQuest CEO Shane Harris said in a July Reddit post, covered by UploadVR and Road to VR, that the company acquired the rights to the Altspace name. His framing was careful: “a brand new Altspace,” a “spiritual successor,” not a tape restore of Microsoft’s code. No firm ship day was attached—only fall.
Harris said the relaunch will carry a lot of the features and functionality Altspace had around 2016–2017, and that he has assembled previous Altspace staffers plus longtime community members. One named rehire is Christian Boe, the concept designer behind the original robot avatars. The new platform is expected to ship robots again alongside custom avatars—a deliberate callback to the egalitarian early look before Microsoft pushed everyone into human bodies.
Why the timing matters
Altspace launched in May 2015 under founder Eric Romo, was acquired by Microsoft in 2017, and was shut down on March 10, 2023 amid broader Microsoft layoffs as the company redirected attention toward Mesh. Mesh itself was later deprecated. The social vacuum did not stay empty for long in the other direction: VR.org’s July analysis places the SideQuest bid against a brutal 2026 ledger for social VR—Rec Room going dark and Meta walking Horizon Worlds off Quest after a brief reversal—arguing that buying the best-remembered name and hiring back the people who defined it is less nostalgia than a bet on events-first community software.
That bet is still thin on product detail. There is no public price, no published headset list, no monetization model, and no day on the calendar. SideQuest’s own history includes Banter and OpenXR work, and February 2025 layoffs after years of capital raises—UploadVR notes both the scale of the audience SideQuest has hosted and the fact that it was not immune to the industry’s contraction. A trademark and a fall teaser are not a Tuesday-night comedy club that fills itself.
What to watch
Harris promised regular updates. The controlling public artifacts today are the Reddit announcement, the trade coverage from late July, and the Fall 2026 teaser. If SideQuest ships anything resembling the 2016–2017 Altspace—robots, events calendar, spaces you can actually schedule into—it will be the first serious attempt to rebuild that specific social contract since Microsoft pulled the plug. Until a date and a client land, treat “fall” as a window, not a promise with a clock.
Sources: UploadVR — AltspaceVR Will Relaunch This Fall Under SideQuest CEO Shane Harris (30 Jul 2026); Road to VR — SideQuest is Reviving Microsoft’s Social VR Platform ‘Altspace’ This Fall (30 Jul 2026); VR.org — Rec Room Died, Horizon Worlds Left VR, and Now Somebody Is Rebuilding Altspace (30 Jul 2026); Altspace teaser — Coming Fall 2026.