Meta “Pauses” Third-party Headset Program, Effectively Cancelling Horizon OS Headsets from Asus & Lenovo

By
Ben Lang
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67

Meta has “paused” its initiative to bring third-party Horizon OS headsets to the market. The company says it has shifted focus to “building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market.”

The News

A little over a year and a half ago, Meta made an “industry-altering announcement,” as I called the move in my reporting: the company was rebranding the Quest operating system to ‘Horizon OS’ and announced it was working with select partners to launch third-party VR headsets powered by the operating system.

Image courtesy Meta

Meta specifically named Asus and Lenovo as the first partners it was working with to build new Horizon OS headsets. Asus was said to be building an “all-new performance gaming headset,” while Lenovo was purportedly working on “mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment.”

But as we’ve now learned, neither headset is likely to see the light of day. Meta say it has frozen the third-party Horizon OS headset program.

“We have paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market,” a Meta spokesperson told Road to VR. “We’re committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for 3rd-party device partnerships as the category evolves.”

My Take

The news comes amid a shifting of priorities for Reality Labs (Meta’s AI and XR division). Seemingly aware that it needs to up its game on the ease-of-use and polish of its wearables, Meta recently announced that a long-time Apple design lead joined the company in an effort to “elevate design within Meta, and pull together a talented group with a combination of craft, creative vision, systems thinking, and deep experience building iconic products that bridge hardware and software.”

Further, the company is now reportedly “focused on making the [Reality Labs] business sustainable and taking extra time to deliver our experiences with higher quality.” Which has reportedly led to the decision to delay a forthcoming Vision Pro competitor into 2027, and possibly raising prices on future gaming headsets.

SEE ALSO
Valve Says No New First-party VR Game is in Development

But Meta isn’t making these changes out of nowhere. The introduction of Vision Pro and now Android XR are creating new competition which Meta is responding to. Android XR, in particular, could have been a major foil in the Horizon OS third-party headset program.

Meta previously stated it wanted to be the ‘Android of XR’, an ‘open’ alternative to Apple’s approach with VisionOS. Opening up Horizon OS to new hardware partners was part of that play. But this was well before Android XR was actually announced. Now it’s becoming clear that the platform best positioned to be the ‘Android of XR’ is… well… Android XR itself. Without the backstop of app stores with millions of widely used apps (as VisionOS and Android XR have), Meta has found itself at a major disadvantage.

That’s not to say Horizon OS doesn’t have its own upsides. It clearly has the biggest and best library of immersive experiences on any standalone headset. But that may not have the same strategic value as the entire Google Play or App Store catalogs.

From the outset there’s also been another wrinkle in the third-party Horizon OS strategy: pricing. It’s well known that Meta sells its headsets at cost or perhaps even lower (hoping to make back the money on the software side), allowing it to outcompete practically any other headset maker on price. If you’re Asus or Lenovo, and your profit only stands to come from the hardware, how can you compete against the platform holder itself which is selling its own super low cost headsets?

If I were Asus or Lenovo, Android XR looks like a more welcome home for a third-party headset. Not only does it have the backing of the Google Play store and all the apps that come with it, but unlike Meta, Google is not (yet) competing with its own hardware partners.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • ErickTheDiver

    It was never going to happen.

    • namekuseijin

      just like GTA SA – I bet Rockstar never heard about it until Zuck announced that.

      they keep lying like this to investors while delivering an absolutely awful broken mess with issues they don't even know about because Meta themselves don't use them… users who do probably left in disgust, which is why the broken toy is only used by brats today

      • NL_VR

        You mean Quest is only used by brats or that its brats that only online on Metas Horizon world platform?

  • Paolo Minisini

    Meta is run by a herd of drunk hippos that move randomly in their pond.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cfa093a403cf8704065ab6fba6bef7083e9688360ba208c2b0380b57d46f7606.png

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: they knew long beforehand that it probably couldn't work, but still had to try, hoping that a solution could somehow be found.

    During his 2021 Facebook Connect keynote, 2.5 years before Meta announced opening Horizon OS to other companies, John Carmack pretty much explained that they had considered 3rd party headsets for years, but why wouldn't make sense either for the low nor the high end:

    We used to early on in Oculus talk a lot about the possibility of kind of 2nd or 3rd party headsets that could interoperate with our ecosystem. That turned out to be really challenging to do, because like Mark said, we sell our headsets at a loss or break even, there's no profit in the headset. So there is no way that a company could go and say "I want to make a budget headset, I'm going to undercut the prices here" without wanting to be able to negotiate for a cut of the eco system revenue. That's just kind of the way those things work.

    And on the high end, while we could imagine somebody going saying "Well, I'm going to make a very expensive headset", most of the interesting features that we talk about things like eye and face tracking and world tracking, these are things that require deep core system software integration to really make them valuable. And so we can't work that closely with another company dealing with that, it's just really really challenging.

    There's still a couple spots where it might work if a company made a super wide FoV headset or a super high resolution headset that was still basically the same thing, it's still exactly the same sensors or exactly the same modalities that we have in Quest 2. Maybe something like that could work, but there's nothing like that kind of really going on right now.

    I believe that Meta really wanted to open Horizon OS. Or maybe more felt forced to do so to compete with an expected Android XR, even though they knew the business case just wasn't there. And the approach was somewhat ill-conceived from the beginning, as Google launched the open-to-all Android not to create a second mobile platform, but to protect its lucrative advertising business that was moving towards mobile. They still pay Apple around USD 20B each year to be the default search engine on iPhones.

    Google tried/tries hard not to compete with its partners. Their original Nexus line of phones was always created with partners like Samsung or Lenovo, and were mostly technical showcases of new Android features without undercutting prices. The first Android XR device is again from Samsung. And companies are allowed to massively alter Android to differentiate themselves, adding their own features and UI, as long as they also integrate Chrome, Play Store and Play services with Google apps etc..

    Google only launched their homebrew Pixel phones after others repeatedly failed to adopt newer Android features and fell behind Apple with only offering 2-3 years of OS updates. So the Pixels are "how to do Android right" phones that are competitively priced to push Android forwards, not to gain market share from partners. They still make most money from ads, apps sales are in no way as profitable or important as on iOS due to most Android users being very reluctant to pay for software.

    So while Horizon OS superficially seemed to copy Androids 3rd party licensing model, the pre-conditions were completely different. Meta had to offer cutting edge hardware at low prices to grow XR, with no secondary revenue stream like ads on the new platform itself to pay for everything, and no way for partners to extend the platform to add value. A conflict of interest was inevitable, with no good reasons for others to jump aboard the Horizon OS train other than Meta owning the dominant XR platform, hoping for a more profitable future. But that platform turned out to be tiny, with no guarantee that it will stay dominant, and is now overtaken by smartglasses. So any remaining interest from third parties most likely vanished during the last few years.

    • I was thinking at Carmack, too, while reading the news

    • foamreality

      If meta wants to compete with google, it needs to create a privacy respecting VR OS. In 5 – 10 years nobody is going to want a creepy google AI device with 6 always on cameras. The DeGoogling backlash has already begun.. People are getting sick of corporate data-hoarders & their monopolist enshittification of everything. Of course that is Meta's bread and butter too, maybe even worse. I hope they both fail. Awful companies that have knowingly and willingly harmed society and culture in unforgivable ways. Maybe Valve can take them all on. One can hope.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        If people cared enough about privacy to avoid platforms that hoard and sell their data, Facebook would have gone bankrupt a decade ago. And so far their revenue knows only one direction, up.

        Tiny Valve won't change that, and Quest's user base has proven to be very price sensitive, so there is basically no chance that they will go and pay significantly higher prices for an HMD platform that respects their privacy. One actually exists with the Apple Vision Pro. The current entry price is USD 3500, and even if we get an Vision Air at half the price and 40% less weight, the vast majority of VR enthusiasts will still say that it is rubbish because Meta sells the Quest 3 for USD 500. People know that "if you are not paying for the product, you are the product", and nonetheless demand that Meta keeps subsidizing HMDs, selling them at production cost and eating all the hardware and software development, which is in no way covered by the 30% they get from app sales on the Horizon store.

        Right now it is up to everybody to avoid services that cannot be trusted with data, but it is almost impossible to not get tracked and profiled across tons of sites unless you go completely offline, unacceptable for newer generations. So I don't exactly share your hope that a large enough backlash against the data hoarders is coming. The only thing that has put a limit on data abuse and sale has been legislation like the EU GDPR. And the only thing that has put a serious dent in Facebook's earnings was Apple forcing them to ask iPhone users for permission before tracking them, which basically nobody allowed them to do.

  • Andrey

    Fuck them!
    Based on leaks, ASUS Rog Tarius was the second most anticipated headset for me, right after Quest 4. If it would release in 2026 with promised features like eye-tracking, MicroOLED screens and price around 1000-1500$, I would buy it immediately right after release.
    Firstly they've cancelled GTA SA VR that I was VERY looking forward to for years, now they've killed my potential next headset, so now either I will be forced to wait until 2027 to finally get a new Quest with eye-tracking or I will need to purchase something like Steam Frame with subpar specs or outdated secondhand Quest Pro.
    "The Meta's VR future it so bright, I gotta wear RayBan AI-powered shades." (c)

  • XRC

    Taipei and Beijing are breathing relief after being associated with such corporate bullsh*ttery from the goons at Meta

    Rebranding Oculus was a textbook example of marketing egomania

    • xyzs

      My gf still calls my hmd an Oculus (even my Samsung Odyssey+), and every time it happens, I am thinking "Zuck really killed such a powerful brand for his dumb ego, it's a masterclass of terrible business decision"

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        My pet peeve is teens saying they have a VR, instead of headset/Quest or whatever. I'd be totally fine with people calling everything an Oculus (which they did during the Rift days) or a Quest, but "having a VR" is just wrong.

      • Jonathan Winters III

        It's very true. Oculus was an established name. They really f&cked up by ditching the name.

  • Paul Bellino

    LONG LIVE STEAM FRAME. FUCK META…..

    • Sky Castle

      At least Meta is churning out VR games. What the hell has Steam brought in terns of VR since HLA? Yeah…not a damn thing…

      • Paolo Minisini

        Um… Meta acquired Ready At Dawn (and other developers) only to kill them shortly thereafter. Everything Meta does, they do not do to "satisfy you" but to fatten the wallets of their shareholders.

        • Dragon Marble

          That's far from truth. The shareholders are mat at their VR investments. Meta is taking huge losses. It's us VR enthusiasts that benefit from this golden era that seems about to end. Enjoy while you still can.

          • Paolo Minisini

            I'm not enjoying anymore the Meta sh*t.
            I'm slowly leaving the Meta ecosystem.
            I hope Steam Frame will become a "new home" for many VR enthusiasts, tired of the nonsense made by Meta in the last years.
            EVERY SINGLE TIME a game is on Steam, I get it there because my VR future is far from Meta.
            Horizon, Gorilla Tag and the kids playing it, and many other things (like the inconsistence of Quest UI changing at every update… They are crazy). No thanks. There is another future for VR. Without Meta, I hope.

          • Dragon Marble

            Well, then prepare for even sh*ttier sh*t to come after Meta stops funding games and subsidizing hardware.

          • Jonathan Winters III

            This.

          • Herbert Werters

            Personally, I now only play my flat games with VR mods because I can't find anything appealing. For me, there haven't been any real VR games that have caught my attention for two oder three years. I don't need Meta. They've thrown themselves out of the race with their constantly changing strategies. If it's not possible without Meta, then so be it, and VR can go down with them. But do you really believe that? Personally, I don't need a savior like Meta. It's a completely exaggerated view to put Meta on such a pedestal.

            Looking back at the Rift CV1 and Vive 1 era, what has Meta really improved so far, apart from selling lots of cheap VR headsets? The games haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse. Developers are just as worried as before, if not more so, about their investments, because the range of products on offer has become so much larger and it's impossible to get any attention amid the pile of poor-quality software. The alleged 20 million users aren't buying games. Meta publishes its figures every quarter, and we can see that growth has stagnated. In relation to the increase in user numbers, you could even say that it's getting worse. I don't understand all the hype surrounding Meta's money.

            Explain to me what would happen if Meta threw in the towel?

          • Dragon Marble

            I don't need VR mods any more. I have UEVR sitting on my 4090 PC. Haven't touched it for a long while. I am interested in the Ready or Not VR mod, but probably won't have time for it.

            Mods — even official ports sometimes — just won't do it for me. Light Brigade, for example, is much better than Roboquest.

            I don't care how big the game is. I don't want to pretend like a kid that I am "leveling up" on a giant skill tree. I want something more tangible and mature. Only a built-for-VR game can provide that.

            A flat game is ultimately just a video game. A VR game is often more than that.

          • Herbert Werters

            That is now the answer to the question of what would get worse if Meta pulled out and stopped investing money?

          • NL_VR

            Verry well said i feel the same. Flatscreen games feel to much as a "game". VR games you feel immersed.
            a VR mod for a flatgame could work if the game is good, it wont magically make an uninteresting game interesting.

          • NL_VR

            What type of games do you like when you cant find VR games that suits you ?

          • Herbert Werters

            More platformers or third-person action adventures, more adventure games in general, jump and runs—basically everything that exists in flat and doesn't exist in VR. I think that's one of the big problems that's being underestimated. The games that people love on a flat screen are hardly available in VR. They did exist in the early days of VR, but were discontinued far too quickly. There weren't enough VR customers. Now there are these players, but these games are no longer being produced. VR should try again with gamepad VR option games and see if they would be popular.

        • Hussain X

          Um… Gabe acquired a $500 million dollar super yacht (and other yachts) only to become just another yacht in the fleet shortly thereafter. Everything Valve does, they do not do to "satisfy you" but to fatten the armada of yachts of their owner, Lord Gaben.

        • All of Darkness

          Meta is killing studios for some sick domination of the VR market, not for profits. They've famously not made a profit in a while with their investments for Reality Labs. They make money by selling your data. Not good people but they are one of the few investing in VR R&D and AAA games (for standalones unfortunately).

  • Jer

    Didn't even mention Valve Steam Frames.
    That's the real competition.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Not really, or at least only in spirit. While the Frame will (hopefully) be a great HMD, and Valve looks like a giant in PC gaming land, the company itself is tiny and a niche player in hardware. The Steam Deck sold about 6M units by early 2025, and estimates put it at 8M sold over close to four years by the end of 2025. But this is of course peanuts compared to the Nintendo Switch with over 150M. And the Switch 2 sold more than 3.5M in the first four days, then exceeded 10M units four months after launch.

      Meta should by now have sold more than 25M Quest (mostly Quest 2), and these numbers very apparently aren't high enough for them, shifting their focus to smartglasses. Although I suspect that the Frame will be cheaper than most expect, it will still be much, much more expensive than a Quest 3S, which is currently the best selling VR HMD by far. So just like AVP lit a fire under Meta's butt regarding UI and user experience improvements, the Frame may trigger another rush of improvements in ergonomics and friction reduction, but there is no way either of them will sell anywhere close to what Meta sells anytime soon.

      Developer's turning away from Horizon OS due to falling app sales and Meta pushing the free-to-play Horizon Worlds is probably a bigger concern for Meta than hardware competition from Valve. And it is quite likely that five years from now Meta HMDs will still dominate PCVR on the Steam hardware survey.

  • xyzs

    Can we have good news just once a year regarding VR ???

    Why every time I check VR news, I am like:
    oh bad news
    oh that's not good
    useless product
    delayed a third time ?
    oh that's cancelled? noo
    what the heck is this crap, they serious?
    ohh one more game not even 10 percent as good as 5yo hla…
    wow, interesting.. wait they plan a potential release in 5~10 years.. okkk

    • Dragon Marble

      OK, VR is dead again. Take a breath, and look at this:

      2025: Samsung Galaxy XR.
      2026: Steam Frame
      2027: "Meta Quest Air"

      That's if you don't count Meganex, Bigscreen, Pimax and Play For Dream. How many headsets can you possibly buy?

      • xyzs

        It's not about the number of products, it's about how relevant they are.
        – Samsung Galaxy XR: The most interesting product this year. Still $2000 usd, Still providing gamecube level apps like Meta.
        – Steam Frame, interesting ecosystem, especially for me with my very powerful PC, but no way jose I am putting 1k for mid gray night displays LCD in 2026…
        – Meta Quest Air, first of all, it's just theory, second of all, it brings nothing improved over the 2+ yo Quest 3, except weight loss. Still LCD crap…

        To me, a truly valuable VR improvement would have been for example an Apple Vision 2 Air, 250 grams on the head, M5VR chip with specialized GPU, cost reduced to $2000~2500. What Apple COULD do if they truly cared about "spatial computing".
        I remember the first years of smartphone, every year, our devices were almost obsolete trash compared to the next gen, because they truly competed to make the future coming faster.

        • Dragon Marble

          Of course, the best headset is always the one that does not exist.

          • Christian Schildwaechter
          • xyzs

            Ahah quite true but i still buy hmds and use them. I am just disappointed at limitations. OLED and eye tracking should be just mandatory.
            Fov should be the race between brands.
            Etc.
            Instead we have 5yo hardware barely outdated because nothing improved

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            TL;DR: In the end it's all about money and technical limits.

            Going back to the early Oculus Connects and their chief scientist Michael Abrash's projections of future VR technology, it seemed we would have 4K HMDs by 2020 and 8K standalones with varifocal lenses by 2025, made possible by very precise eye tracking and foveated rendering.

            Didn't really happen yet despite of billions in research. It's not that Meta didn't try. We also saw a massive slowdown in the development of esp. desktop CPU and GPU speeds, with now much more marginal per-generation improvements and increasing prices, as the low hanging fruits of Moore's law are picked and decreasing transistor size as a cheap way to gain performance hits physical limits.

            Add that with current tech, there is still a lot of friction involved with VR use, and only a very tiny fraction of gamers care about VR, with many abandoning it quickly, and it becomes hard to blame them for not doing even more. Yes, we are now approaching gaming console lifespans for VR HMDs, something that seemed unfathomable for a still developing technology, but a lot of that is due to market realities.

            We have passed many milestones that people expected to trigger a mass adoption, with low prices, higher resolutions, no longer needing a PC, going wireless, faster SoCs, AAA releases, libraries with thousands of games and more, and they barely made a dent. So "if only they would publish more games/use OLED/4K/high FoV" as an argument for companies to spend even more money probably won't help. Yes, it would be great if VR could improve at the same pace as smartphones did during their early days. But those have economies of scale on their side, and by now at least half the world's population using them daily, often for hours, while VR has maybe 20M active users total. Increasing HMD prices to allow for more advanced tech would drive down the user numbers even further, and part of the problem of lacking progress is VR taking a piggy back ride on smartphone technology, which itself has already matured and now sees much less yearly changes.

            And while I agree that not adding eye tracking hardware on Quest 3 was a big mistake that came back and now bites Meta in the ass, this was partly due to Quest 3 being mostly about graphics improvements, not adding a lot of CPU power, so it could run Quest 2 class games "prettier", allowing developers to serve both generations. Eye movement prediction as part of ETFR is compute heavy and was borderline useless on Quest Pro due to SoC performance limits and increased battery draw, so again technical realities ruined what looked like an obviously good idea.

            So even though I'd like the tech to move faster, and was really hoping for Valve to release a 4K microOLED HMD using an AMD APU capable of running proper PCVR games, I'm currently happy that VR development continues with improvements more on the software side, instead of just vanishing for a couple of decades into university/industry/military use only like it did in the 90s.

          • foamreality

            VR only exists in OLED.

            LCD is immersionless crap that rightly drives people back to flat game + monitors. Those people aren't coming back to VR for a decade.

        • Jonathan Winters III

          "gamecube apps" is quite the exaggeration. More like PS3-level graphics at this point.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Resident Evil 4 was initially released on the Nintendo Gamecube in 2005. The Quest port uses graphics from the 2011 HD remaster for PS3/Xbox 360 though.

          • xyzs

            Ok the best looking standalone vr game is looking like a PS3 era game. It’s only the 99 percent rest that looks like gamecube, my bad.

          • All of Darkness

            "PS3 era game"?, there are ports on the Quest like Iron Man VR (a PS4 PSVR release). It was heavily "optimized" for the Quest port by having fixed foveated rendering and lower resolution and assets but still very much looks and plays like the PS4 game. On the Quest 3 with QGO you can increase the rendering resolution both overall and FFR range. So calling a port "PS3 graphics" doesn't make sense. The devs chose not to release an update for the Quest 3. Same for Switch 1 games that run or look awful and Nintendo or the developers choose not to release a patch (free or paid) that would allow the game to run at native resolutions or higher frame rates. There's several newer titles that do genuinely look or run like a real PS4/PSVR release.

            It's mobile hardware though, there's a balance of performance to battery life that both Meta and developers try to maintain. I usually only play PCVR so I don't care about battery life but yes games on mobile hardware do get "optimized" to a lower level of graphics for battery life. Some of my favorite VR games are from the 2017-2019 era and modern standalone headsets can run those titles with raw performance alone.

      • Herbert Werters

        Yes, hardware, but what about the rest?

        • Dragon Marble

          The list on the software side is even longer. Even if I restrict it to HLA level my post would be too long. So I won't do it here.

          I used to play MODs. Not anymore. There are too many good VR games now. I can't even finish those I already bought.

          • Herbert Werters

            Enjoy your Copium ;)

      • Oxi

        Hardware isn't the issue, each new device has a small step forward but that isn't the issue here. Take the steam frame, I am excited to get but the games I will be playing on it came out in 2020, many of the games I will play on it are from developers who don't exist anymore.

        • Dragon Marble

          OK, I am starting to see what the problem is. Those of you claiming "no games" are probably PCVR only. Open up your dietary. There are plenty of great games out there. Too many for me to play.

      • foamreality

        Its dead because there are only five , maybe six proper AAA VR games in existence. Its been 10 years. What good is a 2000 dollar headset when all you can play is beat saber and alyx for the gazillionth time. Ironically its only microsoft (FS2024) single-handedly keeping the entire high end consumer VR market afloat. What good is the perfect headset with nothing to put on it?

        • Dragon Marble

          I am not sure you are exaggerating just to be argumentative or you actually don't know what VR games are out there.

    • sfmike

      This is predatory capitalist America where if your product doesn't make big profits every quarter on an upward trajectory it's time to shut it down. This is the reason China flourishes and grows while we stagnate and fall apart. Planning for the future no longer exists as a population drained of cash won't support anything but bare necessities that our corporate masters use algorithms now to make sure they can get every last cent of the working class's money.

      • All of Darkness

        100% agree but Meta isn't making much of a profit as far as I know with their "Reality Labs". They're making money from selling people's data. I have no idea what Zuckerburg's real intentions are but he's one of the few big spenders in the VR space so it sucks more when they make decisions like this.

        • foamreality

          Google and meta have no interest in VR, they only have an interest in data mining and advertising. That's why VR has stalled over the last 10 years, They are holding it back to enshittify, and others can't compete financially while they do.

      • Oxi

        That doesn't apply to facebook, Zuck is the majority voting shareholder. VR was an unprofitable money sink that has not paid off in any way for investors. I am interested in how XR will pan out in china, it's in the five year plan but it seems like their priorities also shifted to AI.

        • foamreality

          China is going to for XR what they did for the car industry and the AI industry. Surpass everyone else, in a short time at a half the cost, and with better everything. They already have the best headset on the market, sold out: Play4Dream.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          People underestimate how much China has turned into a hyper-capitalist economy, where technology is largely driven by making money, not five year plans by a central comity. The government may ease taxes and regulatory hurdles for areas of interest like AI, finance research in universities and have their own development within the military, but the main drive comes from giants like Baidu, which are sort of China's Google, doing many similar things like search, ads, autonomous cars, video portals and of course lots of data centers filled with AI hardware.

          Regarding XR in China, I'm recycling one of my comments from last months about Pico's market share:

          From a post by CINNO Research about XR sales in 2025 (mp_weixin_qq_com/s/EMaXQ4uRwTASJoGo5evkEg), translated via Google translate:

          1. Market performance: In the first half of 2025, the overall sales volume of the domestic XR consumer market was 261,000 units, an increase of 9 % month-on-month and a decrease of 21 % year-on-year.

          VR devices: The domestic consumer VR market is in a slump, and VR device sales are under pressure. In the first half of 2025 , the sales volume of consumer VR was 75,000 units, which is the lowest in nearly three years. The main reason is that there is less investment in the VR content ecosystem in China, and there are no major new products released in the first half of the year.

          For a population of 1.4B, 75K HMDs in six months is nothing. So VR isn't doing so hot in China either, the majority of XR glasses are birdbath viewers used for watching movies. In the past several companies sold Quest 2 clones rather cheap with subscriptions for Netflix-like streaming services, to be used as virtual screens. Pico holds 46% of the domestic market, but Meta, who don't even sell there and don't offer the required online services in China, hold 28%. Chinese Quest owners have to somehow import the HMD themselves and connect to Meta via VPN to actually use it. And just like in the US, there is a massive push towards smartglasses, which already sell twice as many units in China as all other XR HMDs combined.

      • ichigo

        Yeah let's ignore China before the big pivot around the 70s that they did (what system…). And one of worst environmental records, And the suicide nets outside factories. Oh and lax on anti-sweatshop laws. But sure China flourishing…Better than them bread lines they had anyway….(55 million deaths).

        China gets work and contracts from west because they are cheap from the poor conditions their working class are put in. Ironic the people moaning about America are using Chinese made phones where a working class person most likely ended up in one of them nets. "fighting the system" HAHAHA!

    • namekuseijin

      maybe because it's a small niche with no consumers – most just waste their time in free monkeverses or furryverses while remembering the good old days when Lord Gaben dumped on them an extended overhyped tech demo

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: Lenovo has been releasing VR HMDs since 2017, was one of Meta's Horizon OS licensees and already partnered with Valve on SteamOS for their their Legion Go S handheld, making them the more likely partner.

    Asus is currently (too) deep in bed with Microsoft with its ROG Xbox Ally (X) handheld running a gaming optimized Windows 11 and booting directly into the Xbox app. Lenovo is the much more likely candidate to partner with Valve, as they already ship their Lenovo Legion Go S handheld with either Windows 11 or SteamOS, with the latter being both cheaper and providing a superior experience.

    Lenovo is also a much more avid VR player. They sold Windows Mixed Reality HMDs, build the Rift S for Oculus, offered the only Google Daydream standalone ever created and produced Qualcomm ARM based standalones running their Android based ThinkReality platform. And they were one of the Horizon OS partners, allegedly targeting a high resolution HMD for productivity, as Lenovo (having bough IBM's PC business division with brands like ThinkPad) is still a big player in office IT. They have been trying to engage in XR for a long time, with a lot of OS hopping involved.

    The problem with SteamOS on 3rd party devices is (Valve) time. When Valve introduced Steam Deck in 2021-07, they said they'd love other PC handhelds to run it too. Handhelds from Ayaneo and GPD already existed, Asus and Lenovo introduced their own running Windows in 2023 to reviews praising the hardware and condemning the OS (Wired about Legion Go: "This is one of the better attempts at a very bad idea: Putting Windows on a gaming handheld"), so there was no doubt 3rd party interest. Yet it took almost four years after Valve's statement about offering their OS to others for the Legion Go S to get official SteamOS support, which improved it significantly over the Windows version released four months earlier.

    So I'm pretty sure that Lenovo has already contacted Valve about running SteamOS on one of their own ThinkReality ARM standalones (or Horizon OS prototypes), if they didn't already know about the Frame beforehand due to their cooperation on the Legion Go S. The only question is how many years it will take for such an HMD to actually make it to market.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    Obviously Meta burning to the ground, instead of only lighting huge piles of money on fire at MRL to send a message.

  • namekuseijin

    nobody gives a dunno for this broken mess of a dumpster fire…

  • All of Darkness

    I mostly hate this turn of events. Meta isn't committed to releasing cutting edge XR headsets. The Quest Pro is the best they've made and it's flawed in several ways. The deal for other manufacturers to make Horizon headsets would have fixed that problem for the users while Meta still receives money for games sold on their platform. Very close to how Lenovo makes a handheld that is running Steam OS out of the box and is officially supported by Valve. Meta isn't making money on the base Quest 3 or S, they're sold at a loss so it doesn't seem advantageous for them to do this. I would genuinely prefer a newer Quest Pro with the latest chip and refreshed hardware (higher resolution, better cameras and more dimming zones). I'd put my BigScreen Beyond 2e up for sale the next day. Even if it was just the latest Snapdragon XR chip I'd still keep it as an alternate headset like I do with the current headsets now.

  • Oxi

    Just mistake after mistake after mistake. They tried to force VR to become mainstream in 2021 and it's just been a mess.

  • Kev

    I imagine nobody will partner with them again unless they include serious consequences in the agreement.
    can you imagine the amount of capital their partners must have wasted on a false program?

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      You are assuming that it was Meta that pulled out of the deal, not Asus and Lenovo first. The 3rd party Horizon OS announcement came in April 2024, a few weeks after AVP started shipping, and about half a year after Google/Samsung had delayed their HMD, very apparently as a reaction to AVP. So there seemed to be a lot of momentum in the XR market at that time, with companies scrambling to come up with a response. Asus and Lenovo very likely looked at Meta as the then largest XR platform to position themselves for whatever would come next.

      But what came next was that the hype around AVP quickly died down, with Google and Samsung very apparently not releasing anything anytime soon. So the short moment of excitement around high end standalones in 2024 just passed, not resulting in a sudden rush of lots of companies entering the XR market, which also meant that neither Asus nor Lenovo would be left behind if they couldn't present their own HMDs. I'm pretty sure Meta would have loved them releasing higher end Horizon OS HMDs, it just never made sense economically, and in the end turned out to not make enough sense tactically either.

      • Kev

        The fact that literally nobody released a horizon os upgrade or any headset based on it tells the story. Clearly horizon os was never in a state that could be shipped.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Well, all Quest 2/3/3S/Pro run Horizon OS and receive regular updates, so it is not that Horizon OS isn't ready to ship. I've quoted John Carmack above stating that their model pretty much only works for companies using almost identical hardware, only changing minor things like the resolution that don't require changing the OS.

          So Asus should have been able to for example release a 2.5K Horizon OS HMD with an XR2(+) Gen 2, using the same eye tracking camera setup as on Quest Pro, as these features were already implemented and shipped in Meta headsets.

          The only thing you can conclude from them not shipping is that something changed that made them decide against going forwards with it. You cannot conclude whether it was on the side of Meta, Asus or Lenovo, or whether the issue was with hardware development, software or simply the market changing.