The Quest 3 is Meta’s last chance to win the headset war before it truly begins
Meta has shipped six VR headsets in seven years. Only one has been an obvious success.
The company sold 20 million Quest headsets, mostly the Quest 2, as shelter-in-place adults tried to escape their homes (and babysit preteens!) during the early pandemic. Since then, Meta’s struggled to justify why it rebranded its entire company around the metaverse — a concept it’s only now just barely beginning to deliver in any intriguingly tangible way.
Tomorrow, as Meta tries to sell you a $500 Meta Quest 3, it’ll need to do better.
It will need games.
And it could really use them soon — because this may be the last time Meta has the table all to itself.
Right now, Meta still has a chance to convince every prospective VR headset buyer they should choose a Quest 3 instead of whatever those companies might do next. Valve, in particular, appears to be gearing up to follow Meta’s lead with a more affordable headset that might not need a PC.
On the hardware front, I expect the Quest 3 will impress: on paper and in images, the Quest 3 looks like an improvement in almost every possible way: smaller, lighter, twice as powerful, with depth sensing, upgraded haptics, and no more flimsy plastic rings on the controllers for you to break flinging them around.
But at $499, it costs as much as a PS5 or Xbox Series X now that both consoles are reaching their stride with games — and Meta will also have to overcome the apathy of gamers it’s burned along the way. Let’s review:
You got mildly burned if you bought into Meta’s vision of a gaming PC plugged into a high-end corded headset, as it ditched those in favor of the largely wireless Quest. But if you bought into the Quest, you got to watch Meta inexplicably take one of its biggest games
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