Don’t buy the Meta Quest Pro for gaming. It’s a metaverse headset first

digitaltrends.com:

Last week’s Meta Connect started off promising on the gaming front. Viewers got release dates for Iron Man VR, an upcoming Quest game that was previously a PS VR exclusive, as well as Among Us VR. Meta, which owns Facebook, also announced that it was acquiring three major VR game studios — Armature Studio, Camouflaj Team, and Twisted Pixel — although we don’t know what they’re working on just yet.

Unfortunately, that’s where the Meta Connect’s gaming section mostly ended. Besides tiny glimpses and a look into fitness, video games were not the show’s focus. Instead, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to focus on what seemed to be his company’s real vision of VR’s future, which involves a lot of legs and a lot of work with the Quest Pro, a mixed reality headset that’ll cost a whopping $1,500.

It’s a notable narrative shift for the tech, one that might leave video game players confused about if VR is for them anymore. When Oculus first started making a splash in the 2010s with its headset prototypes and, eventually, its Oculus Rift system, many wondered if it was finally time for video games’ VR dreams to come to fruition. Things actually seemed to be on their way at a slow and flawed pace. However, ever since Meta bought Oculus in 2014, it’s been slowly integrating it into its own big-picture goal of going beyond just being a mere social network and becoming a place where people just exist. And that seemingly means deemphasizing video games as a core goal of the tech … at least in Meta’s world, with the Quest Pro as its signifier.

We already knew that Meta was diving deep into the metaverse (it’s in the name, after all). Horizon Worlds, the company’s metaverse app, is technically a video game. Its website touts cartoonish social