Availability of Quest 2 direct from Meta seems to have dried up, as the company’s last-gen headset is now showing out of stock in nearly all regions—likely making way for what’s next.
Although you can probably find new Quest 2 headsets from the usual online retailers and stores, when Meta pulls the plug on direct availability on any headset, it typically means there’s something just around the corner.
At the time of this writing, the only region with availability direct from Meta is the UK, which still has the 128GB variant in stock, priced at £200.
Quest 2 (left), Quest 3 (right) | Based on images courtesy Meta
The chief rumor going around is the company’s next headset will replace Quest 2 as its cheaper, lower-end hardware next to its flagship headset, Quest 3.
Meta hasn’t confirmed as much, however the company is indeed planning to release a cheaper VR headset in 2024, making the next logical opportunity for launch sometime around its upcoming Connect developer conference, which is planned for September 25th-26th.
Initially released in late 2020, Meta has tinkered with Quest 2 variants and pricing over the years. Most recently, the company slashed the price of Quest 2’s 128 GB version to just $200, likely making it the headset’s final barnburner sale.
Meanwhile, Meta will soon be making a monumental shift in how it operates by releasing its XR operating system to third-party OEMs for the first time, which will see Quest-like devices from ASUS, Lenovo, and Xbox—all of which will have the same OS, content library, and Horizon Worlds social VR layer.
You can check out the full list of April Mega Sale games here, with a majority ranging from 20-40% off, available from now until April 28th at 11:59 PM PT (local time here).
There are also six game bundles available, packing in some of the greats:
Note: Meta does dynamic bundle pricing, so if you own a game already, it will automatically adjust in your cart to reflect items already owned.
The April Mega Sale is just in time for Quest 2’s the new low-low permanent price of $200 for the 128GB version, which also includes a host of accessories knocked down during what feels like a Quest 2 fire sale of its own.
The Meta Quest 2 is an all-in-one virtual reality headset that doesn't need to connect to a PC. It's available for its lowest-ever price of $200 from Best Buy.
Meta is once again reducing the price of Quest 2, this time bringing the 128GB version of its 2020-era standalone VR headset to just $200.
The company has made its new pricing scheme available both from Meta directly and from its partner retailers, which includes Amazon, Walmart, Target, Best Buy, New Egg, and more. Notably, the deal on Walmart includes $50 digital credit to use on games and apps.
The price drop is also affecting a number of countries, as the 128GB version now goes for $200 USD, £199.99 GBP, €249.99 EUR, and ¥31,900 JPY, each of which is around $50 cheaper in their respective currencies.
It’s uncertain how long the deal will last, with some online third-party retailers indicating the sale ends as early as Saturday. As with many such ‘limited time’ deals though, the new pricing scheme has a way of becoming permanent; Meta initially dropped Quest 2 to $250 during the holiday season of 2023, which has stuck until today.
As for the 256GB version, it’s been largely out of stock since the beginning of last year, which could suggest we’re not getting a restock, or price change from its $300 MSRP.
Whatever the case, it’s safe to say the company is looking to flush out stock of the headset, which was launched in late 2020—just two years prior to Quest Pro, a dev-centric headset that is largely considered as forerunner to Meta’s latest standalone, Quest 3.
This comes alongside rumors that Meta is currently prepping a prospective ‘Quest 3 Lite’, which it could be building in partnership with LG. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited the South Korean tech giant earlier this month in confirmation of the deal, however it’s also rumored the company is additionally prepping an Apple Vision Pro competitor for release in 2025, making a very busy near term hardware release schedule indeed.
Meta announced that it’s offering new developer tools for Quest headsets to make avatars more realistic. The company also unveiled a Quest 3-exclusive upper body tracking feature that supports a much wider range of body motion.
Announced at Connect 2023 late last week, Meta showed off some new features coming both to Quest 3 and the rest of the Quest platform.
On Quest 3, Meta says it will be able to use inside-out sensor data to optically track wrists, elbows, shoulders, and torso—or something the company is calling ‘Inside Out Body Tracking’ (IOBT). The Quest 3-exclusive feature also tracks where your legs are relative to your torso, making avatars capable of bending forward and peering over a cliff.
Image courtesy Meta
By using this upper body data to extrapolate lower body actions, the company says it can make avatars replicate more natural movements than traditional inverse kinematics (IK)-based methods.
The company also announced a feature called ‘Generative Legs’, which is headed to Quest 2/3/Pro in December. The developer tool is said to create more realistic leg movement using either three-point body tracking or the Quest 3-exclusive IOBT. It’s capable of recreating more natural standing and sitting poses, a more lifelike gait when walking, and also supports jumping, ducking and squatting.
Since it’s essentially guessing where your legs might naturally be in any given situation, Generative Legs won’t account for individual leg movement like a dedicated tracker might, such as a SteamVR tracking puck or Sony’s Mocapi motion capture device—that means your avatar can’t do karate or breakdance.
Still, it’s pretty impressive how much better the whole system is in comparison to standard IK. Granted, Quest users won’t be able to pull of the fancy footwork CEO Mark Zuckerberg did on the virtual stage at Connect 2022 last year, but it’s starting to look pretty close.
Check out Meta’s Generative Legs and the new Quest 3 upper body tracking feature in action in a Meta-built showcase app called Dodge Arcade:
Meta announced at Connect 2023 that Xbox Cloud Gaming is heading to Quest in December, meaning you’ll be able to play all of your favorite flatscreen games on offer through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.
Meta’s full unveiling of Quest 3 yesterday came with a fair bit of news, including specs, price, pre-orders and shipping dates; long story short, you can get Meta’s $500 consumer mixed reality headset starting October 10th, with pre-orders now live.
Sometime in December, Meta says we’ll also get support for Xbox Cloud Gaming on Quest too, which users will be able to use on a virtual screen that can be adjusted and resized.
There’s no specific date yet for when to expect Xbox Cloud Gaming to the Quest platform. On stage, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg only mentioned that it’s “coming to Quest in December,” so it’s possible we’ll see even Quest 2 included in the list of supported hardware in addition to Quest 3 and (presumably) Quest Pro.
As it stands, there are a few standard caveats. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription and a supported controller (sold separately) is required. Meta says in a blogpost that some streaming limitations may apply as well, including variable server availability and wait times, and geographical restrictions.
Want to know if Quest 3 is worth it? We haven’t gone in for our deep dive review yet, although we got a full hands-on with the headset right before Connect 2023 this week that goes into everything from confort to clarity.
Coming alongside the big Quest 3 info dump today at Connect 2023, Meta revealed that Quest Store games and apps have generated over $2 billion in revenue. While the store is still earning for developers, looking at revenue over time shows that things have cooled off over the last year.
Meta’s Head of Developer Relations Melissa Brown announced the figure on stage, further noting that 100+ new and upgraded titles are coming to the Quest Store before the year’s end, more than half of which will be brand new games and apps.
While $2 billion sounds like an impressive number—it certainly is for the XR industry at large—it pales in comparison to what Meta regularly spends on its Reality Labs division.
Quest 2 next to Quest 3 | Image courtesy Meta
Back in July, the company reported a quarterly loss just south of $4 billion in Q2 2023; Reality Labs’ revenue was down by 39% due to lower Quest 2 sales, making for the worst quarterly performance in the past two years.
With today’s announcement, it’s also clear at what rate content sales have cooled off since Quest 2 was launched in 2020. The company announced at Connect 2022 in October last year that it had topped $1.5 billion in Quest Store revenue, accounting for everything since the first Quest’s launch in 2019, meaning it’s only managed to generate $500 million in the past 12 months, putting a clear end to any kind of take-off ramp that might have appeared to be forming.
Moving forward, this will undoubtedly put more weight on Quest 3 to fill in where Quest 2 left off, as stockholders will no doubt expect the $500 headset to meet or beat its forebear’s relatively meteoric success. Quest 3 pack in much of the functionality of the $1,000 Quest Pro headset, including color passthrough sensors for mixed reality, and has a significantly sleeker profile and more powerful chipset than the now $300 Quest 2.
Will that be enough for first-time VR users to jump in? Enough for Quest 2 users to upgrade? Whatever the case, Meta is undoubtedly subsidizing its XR hardware to make software sales more attractive. And if it doesn’t keep pumping out first-party titles like Asgard’s Wrath 2, they’ll need at least keep those multi-million-dollar success stories coming, like Gorilla Tag’s $26 million in revenue high-swinging success story, or the other 40 Quest games that Meta said had posted revenues over $10 million.
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Connect 2023 kicks off today, taking place September 27th and 28th at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters. There’s been a ton of news already, so make sure to follow along by heading to our main page for all of the latest in Meta’s XR stuff.
Instead of taking you right to your library of installed apps, Meta is making yet another perplexing change to the Quest landing page in v57.
Since the earliest days of Meta’s VR platform, the company has been seemingly obsessed with not putting your library of VR apps front-and-center.
Instead the first thing you see when you put on a headset from the company, or launch its companion smartphone app, is some kind of dynamic ‘feed’ with content you weren’t looking for in the first place.
The Ever Changing ‘Explore’ Page
For a long time when putting Quest on your head Meta made you look at ‘Explore’, an algorithmically-curated assortment of disparate content that was not your library of installed apps.
The current Explore landing page | Photo by Road to VR
Seemingly forever unhappy that people don’t love the Explore page, Meta has constantly reimagined it over the years, changing the layout what seems like every six months. I swear every time I’m finally used to it, it changes.
And once again, it will change.
In the newest Quest v57 update Meta is replacing the Explore landing page with a new and freshly confusing ‘Horizon Feed’, which is also not your library of installed apps.
Sensibly, you might think the Horizon Feed would contain only content from Horizon Worlds, acting as a sort of portal for you to jump into the company’s miniverse. But no, apparently in Horizon Feed you’ll find all manner of games, apps, and of course, Reels!
The new Horizon Feed landing page | Image courtesy Meta
Yes, Reels… the company’s short-form 2D video content that’s designed for quick and casual viewing on a smartphone. Certainly when I put on my headset that’s what I want to see—not my library of installed apps.
Below the Fold
Even the headset’s companion smartphone app, the ‘Meta Quest’ app, doesn’t want to make it easy to access your library of installed apps. Instead, the first thing you see when you launch the app is a smattering of algorithmically-curated content—a feed of course—that you weren’t looking for when you put your headset on in the first place.
Did you know that you can actually remotely launch VR apps on Quest right from the smartphone app? It’s incredibly convenient.
Or it could be, but most people don’t even know that’s possible because to even find your library of installed apps you need to launch the smartphone app, click ‘Menu’ (the last option on the toolbar), then scroll down below the fold to finally find ‘My Library’. Counting from the top of the page, it’s the 17th item down the list of Menu items. It has moved progressively further and further down the page down the years.
Those apps you hand-picked, bought, and installed? Oh yeah, they’re down here on the last page.
Literally ‘Parental Supervision’ and ‘Help and Support’ are placed higher on the list than your library of installed apps.
Does Meta really think that Parental Supervision (something which doesn’t even apply to many users), and Help and Support (how often do you think people need help for this product), should be easier to reach than the user’s library of installed apps?
Feed Me
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Meta has an obsession with algorithmically-curated feeds. It’s the thing that defines the company’s core products (ie: Facebook, Instagram), and small changes to their feed algorithm can have major influence over how long people stay on those platforms and how much they engage.
But here’s the core problem with Meta’s feed obsession. While casual and even mindless scrolling is the norm on smartphones—devices which can be engaged and disengaged with in a matter of seconds—this couldn’t be further from the truth for VR headsets.
Anyone putting on a VR headset already has a damn good reason to bother putting it on in the first place.
They already know what they want to do; getting between them and that thing is just compromising the user experience. If you want to hit them with a feed, do it after they’re done with the thing they intended to do in the first place. And while you’re at it… maybe instead of hiding their library of installed apps—you know, the content they hand-picked and paid for—why not make it easier for the user to launch them in the first place so it’s easier for them to return?
Now of course people at Meta are reading this and saying ‘we’ve got all these stats that show that people really click on the stuff in the feed!’ I’m sure you do… and it’s because that’s the thing you’re constantly putting in front of their face.
Metrics will lead you astray if you aren’t measuring the right things. You’d better believe that friction—the process of putting on the headset and getting to the thing you actually want to do—is and has long been one of VR’s biggest issues. If that’s not what you’re optimizing for (these feeds certainly aren’t) then you’re just crippling the overall user experience.
It’s the people that don’t come back to the headset that you should be most carefully observing, not looking to see if you can steer someone to a different piece of content after they’ve already decided to put the headset on.
Vision Pro shows your apps right when you put on the headset… how novel | Image courtesy Apple
Standing in stark contrast to Meta’s approach is Apple Vision Pro. When you put on the headset, what’s the very first thing you see? Your library of installed apps.
Meta released a Quest software update via its public test channel (PTC), which lets users opt-in to try new features before they’re pushed out to everyone. Among the v57 PTC update is a feature that’s been notably missing from Meta avatars: legs.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised at Connect 2022 that its avatars would eventually be getting legs, putting an end to the platform’s characteristic floating torsos at some point in the not-too-distant future. At the time, Zuckerberg showed off his on-stage avatar jumping and kicking, although it was revealed later this was actually created using some fairly common external motion capture tech.
In short, Quest can’t track legs yet, which means the v57 PTC update is packing a pretty standard implementation of inverse kinematics (IK), resulting in the sort of body positioning guesswork you see in apps like VR Chat. Still, nice to see a full body in Quest Home for once, right?
X (formerly Twitter) user Lunayian shows off the new avatar legs after installing the v57 PTC update.
YouTuber and tech analyst Brad Lynch also tried out the new legs, showing off some of the limitations currently. Notably, you won’t see your avatar’s legs when looking down directly at them—they’re only viewable via the mirror, and ostensibly by other users—and the IK system still doesn’t account for crouching.
According to data mined by X user NyaVR, the v57 PTC update also includes the ability to enable and disable the avatar mirror, a new Horizon Worlds Portal in home, an Airplane Mode, and an Extended Battery Mode.
The comes alongside a wider push to attract more users to Horizon Worlds, as Meta recently took its first steps of endingQuest-exclusivity for the social VR app with the launch of a closed beta on Android mobile devices. It’s also set to arrive on standard PC browsers too at some point.
Additionally, Meta seems to also be investing more in first-party content for Horizon Worlds, having released Super Rumblelate last month, a hero shooter which feels more in line with the sort of sticky content that ought to attract and bring users back more regularly.
We’re sure to learn more about Quest software features and Horizon Worlds stuff at the company’s annual Connect developer conference, which takes place September 27th.
