God, I really wish I knew what to say about High Fidelity's journey, particularly the last six months, since they essentially abandoned their original, highly supportive user community this past spring, and made an abrupt pivot towards becoming a remote workteams app for business users. HiFi has done this to survive, as a means for the company to stay afloat until more consumers take up virtual reality. They were burning through all that venture capital too quickly it seems, and had nothing profitable to show for it, so they decided to take this drastic step.
Look, as a social VR blogger I admit that I have my biases, but as far as I can tell, and from what I have been told by people who were and still are more intimately involved with High Fidelity than I am, this platform is bleeding users and seems to be doomed. There's absolutely no guarantee that a move to a business platform supporting remote workteams is going to succeed. Frankly a business solution still needs all the features that were lacking in the original consumer version.
And it just breaks my heart to watch all this unfold from the sidelines. Things could have been so different. This whole episode is a textbook-classic example that should be studied in business schools on how NOT to treat your existing customers and how NOT to market to potential customers. High Fidelity has gone from mistake to mistake to mistake.
There still are a few in-world events, but overall the original userbase has abandoned HiFi, feeling upset, confused, betrayed and angry at the way High Fidelity is running things. The users are so pissed off that they started their own, separate user forums and Discord because they no longer trusted HiFi to maintain theirs. Many users have left to other social VR platforms such as NeosVR and Sansar.
For more details, you should read FlameSoulis' and Wunkay's detailed negative reviews elsewhere in this review section. Both have been very heavily involved in the High Fidelity developer community, and their reviews are more informed, and more damning, than anything I could write. Go read them:
Flame Soulis's review: https://steamcommunity.com/id/FlameSoulis/recommended/390540
Wunkay's review: https://steamcommunity.com/id/athauxan/recommended/390540/
I'm just going to post this link to my blog here, where you can read all my blogposts about HiFi for yourself, if you're interested: https://ryanschultz.com/category/high-fidelity-highlights/
