We'll be Retiring Two Topics

Effective on July 31, 2018

Game Development

Virtual Reality


Why is Game Development & Virtual Reality going away?

When we first started teaching Game Development, we very quickly turned our focus to virtual reality (VR). Learning some game dev skills is indeed a prerequisite to VR, so creating those courses first was a necessary step, but we made a bet on VR because the market seemed primed to explode. Put another way: We started teaching VR not because there was a huge demand for it, but there was a huge potential demand. We took a small risk and created courses that we believed would help our students stay ahead of the curve as new jobs and contracts emerged.

While consumers and businesses have indeed responded to new HMDs and VR software titles, the initial predictions and "hockey stick graphs" turned out to be unrealistic. There's no doubt that VR has grown tremendously, and is still growing, but the pace of that growth is far below what we anticipated.

Furthermore, the tools and techniques in VR are changing at a rapid pace. We invest several months into a typical Treehouse Course, and a few weeks into our Workshops, and by the time a VR course is released it's already time to start thinking about fixes and updates. Even if we took some measures to increase our speed of production, we would still have a complex maintenance and refresh cycle that wouldn't allow us to achieve more than a handful of courses before we needed to start over again.

Simply put, VR is moving too rapidly for us to teach it effectively and there's just not enough interest right now to justify the opportunity cost. There are other subject areas we could (and should) address that will have an immediate benefit for our students.

Will I still be able to access Game Development and VR courses?

Yes. The current courses will be removed from the library on July 31, 2018. After that, they will be available as a download by submitting a request to our Customer Success Team at help@teamtreehouse.com

Will there be any Game Development and VR courses in the future?

At this time, there are no plans (no, not even secret plans) for new game development and VR courses. However, that doesn't mean there never will be; Change is the nature of technology. Provided there's enough demand, upcoming topics like augmented reality could potentially return our focus to real-time computer graphics applications (which is still dominated by game engines like Unity).

What do you recommend I learn instead?

Our game development content was based on C# and Unity, so it would still be very helpful for you to learn C# starting with our Beginning C# track. If you're looking to continue with Unity, we'd recommend you check out Unity's official learning portal at unity3d.com/learn. We also recommend using this survey to choose one of our Tracks based on your own learning goals.

What will Nick Pettit be teaching instead?

For the last several months, Nick has been working to refine and expand our Design curricula by creating new courses and by working with several guest teachers. If you'd like to see those courses, check out our new and improved Web Design Track.

More recently, Nick's focus has turned to Machine Learning, which is a completely new area for Treehouse. The first ML course, titled Machine Learning Basics, is available now.