We don’t know exactly why VR studios are (almost) giving away their games. But one reason is obvious: they hope to get more visibility on social media and on the Quest Store.
We don’t know exactly why VR studios are (almost) giving away their games. But one reason is obvious: they hope to get more visibility on social media and on the Quest Store.
Speaking as a Quest 2 owner, most games on there feel overpriced. Combine that with how Meta treats older hardware and you can safely guess that many players are probably not feeling confident buying games on that storefront anymore.
Meta recently made developers not allow new updates or installs for older headsets which effectively locks games you paid for away from you being able to play them unless you buy a newer Meta headset.
Conversely, you buy it on Steam where the prices don’t seem to be nearly as much in some cases too, and you can use it with nearly any PC VR headset and they don’t limit it only to newer headsets. Games I buy on Steam feel like mine and I actually have long term access to them. The Meta store’s versions feel like a long term rental situation, as long as I keep buying the newer headsets which is not feasible.
The only benefits of buying on the Meta store is that it can be taken on the go and doesn’t require a PC to play.
They’ve definitely left some people hanging in the past, which sucks. It does feel like Quest 2 will have a longer support though, since it has such a large user base and is still being sold new.
Which is another way of saying meta will do whatever suits them rather than what’s good for owners.
I‘m not defending them here. I‘m just saying that the Quest 2 will probably go a different way.
Most of the things they’ve ended support on were failures (Oculus Go), were sold for a very short time with not many users (Quest 1) or turned out to be not the future in their eyes (basically everything PCVR).
Quest 2 has been sold for a long time and still is, has tens of millions of users and is clearly the path that they’ve decided to focus their energy on.
Again, they absolutely shouldn’t leave people hanging and at the very least have a buy back program or something similar. I‘m not trying to excuse their behavior.
I’m really hoping so. I feel bad for players with the older headsets. It didn’t inspire confidence in me as a Quest 2 owner and it made me rethink an upgrade to a newer headset. I may be in the minority, but I like keeping older hardware/consoles as long as I can even if it comes at a cost to performance. I’d rather be the judge of when I need something better.
I’m wondering how and why they made those changes after leaning more into open source and with third party headsets set to release soon.