The original Oculus Quest will cease receiving new function updates and lose entry to the corporate’s current social VR options, in keeping with an e-mail sent to many Quest users this week.
While Quest headset house owners will nonetheless have the ability to use the system and all obtainable apps, they may not have the ability to “create or join a party,” in keeping with the e-mail. Access to Meta’s Horizon Home options will even be reduce off on March 5, the corporate wrote. And whereas Meta will not be “delivering new features” to Quest 1 customers, the corporate says it should proceed to supply “critical bug fixes and security patches until 2024.”
The announcement comes less than 4 years after the Quest’s initial launch as Meta’s (then Oculus’) first wi-fi headset with full six-degree-of-freedom head- and hand-tracking. That preliminary model of the Quest, which launched at $400, was succeeded by the $300 Quest 2 in late 2020.
The Quest 2 reportedly sold tens of millions of units regardless of a $100 price increase last year. That relative gross sales success has meant many VR builders are more and more focusing on their video games on the Quest 2’s Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chipset and never the original Quest’s weaker Snapdragon 835. Meta’s announcement will not have an effect on support for the Quest 2 at this level, nor for the recently released $1,500 Quest Pro.
The original Quest sundown announcement comes less than a month after former Meta CTO John Carmack announced his departure from the company, which he mentioned was “operating at half the effectiveness that would make me happy.” Carmack was a major proponent of the original Quest inside Meta and a booster of its untethered predecessor, the Oculus Go, which he unlocked via a post-discontinuation update in 2021.
In an October keynote speech, Carmack warned that builders should not design high-end apps for the Quest Pro earlier than “crunching it down” for the less highly effective Quest 2. “The low-end system is going to be where all your real customers are,” he warned.
