Meta says VR Glasses are a different product for a different market. Quest isn’t dead, but it has been relegated, as the company has pulled back from games, shut down a number of studios, and is ostensibly building on its next chapter around something else.
VR Glasses
Meta VR Glasses are a compute-puck-tethered mixed reality headset that’s going on sale sometime in Spring 2027, priced at $1,300.
They use the same operating system as Quest, which means the same games as Quest 3. Although it’s a hand-tracking-first device, it can pair with Touch Plus motion controllers to play the full back catalogue of Quest titles. Check out our hands-on for the full details.
VR Glasses aren’t really a straightforward Quest replacement though, as they’re substantially more expensive, less immersive due to a lower field-of-view, and are being positioned around productivity, communication, and casual media consumption rather than gaming.
When asked why VR Glasses aren’t a Quest Air, Quest 4, or Quest Pro 2, Meta’s Vice President of VR Ryan Cairns explained VR Glasses are a part of the company’s glasses continuum.
“The thing we wanted to signal with the product is: it’s a different product for a different market. It reads like glasses, so we wanted to have it in the spectrum of glasses that go from audio to full immersive VR Glasses.”
To their credit, VR Glasses are sleek and light, and are basically what Apple Vision Pro should have been in the first place. They’re also taking some of the best bits from Quest, repackaging them as new, and selling them to a new audience. But they aren’t Quest, at least not according to Meta.
A Stepping Stone to AR
Anyone who’s followed Meta/Facebook can attest to how erratic its VR strategy has been over the years. So, even with the new, more grownup version of its VR ambitions on display with VR Glasses, it’s difficult to say exactly what the company’s product strategy is right now.
What is certain, though: Meta has shown it can easily cast away years of brand recognition in service of The Bigger Picture™, and drastically redefine its hardware ambitions.
In 2021, the company retired the Oculus name, which up to that point included Oculus Rift DK1, Oculus Rift DK2, Oculus Rift (oft referred to as CV1), Oculus Go, Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift S, and Oculus Quest 2—making Oculus nearly synonymous with VR. It even changed the name of its most successful VR headset to date mid-generation, retroactively applying the Meta name to Quest 2 that year.
We may be seeing another rebrand, if a quieter one. But it looks more like a broad bet on augmented reality.
VR Glasses are light and hand-tracking-first, and they also have a more limited field-of-view, making them a natural bridge to the AR glasses Meta is clearly working toward, and more similar in function to Orion AR glasses prototype unveiled alongside Quest 3S in 2024.
The VR Pullback
Let’s rewind a bit. It all started earlier this year when Meta shut down three of its most-important internal VR studios: Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR), Twisted Pixel (Deadpool VR), and Sanzaru Games (Asgard’s Wrath), all of which were actively developing premium VR content.
Meanwhile, Meta also pulled funding from a number of partner studios, which allegedly led to the cancellation of a Harry Potter Quest game from Skydance Games, VR veteran Cloudhead Games, and a “major project” from Moss developer Polyarc. The cancellation left Polyarc in bad enough shape that the studio was forced to shut down last month.
It’s fairly clear the company was reacting to an underperforming games market and reining in a multi-million-dollar spending spree on content for a platform that still wasn’t turning a profit after seven years of Quest headsets.
Shortly after Meta announced Reality Labs was pivoting to wearables and AI, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth acknowledged the shift, saying the “gravy train has come to a stop.”
It’s an accurate, if indelicate, way of describing the situation. Millions of dollars put toward content was turned off like a spigot, but the fallout went beyond the individual games shelved mid-development.
Hard-won expertise, which Meta worked to attract and shape over the years, had to look elsewhere. Schell Games, the studio behind the VR hits Until You Fall, Among Us VR, and the I Expect You to Die trilogy, has been one of the most ardent opponents against layoffs. Only now has the studio conducted its first layoff in its 24 years of existence.
“There was a time when headset-based VR was 80% of our work, but at the moment it is more like 30%,” said Schell Games CEO Jesse Schell. “We are doing more and more work that is VR-adjacent, such as projects involving interactive projection for location-based entertainment, which we think is a growing trend.”
Mighty Coconut, developer of hit golfing game Walkabout Mini Golf, has been through its second round of layoffs.
“Due to the current state of the games industry and especially VR, Mighty Coconut will need to downsize, and over the next several months we will be saying goodbye to 10 talented people who have helped make Walkabout what it is,” CEO Lucas Martell said last week.
Closing studios, upending a highly-specialized developer ecosystem, and cancelling multi-year projects isn’t generally something you do if you plan to launch another console-class headset anytime soon.
Metaverse Lost
The pullback goes beyond VR games too. Meta has since shuttered Horizon Workrooms and disentangled Horizon Worlds from Quest entirely, making it a purely non-VR social platform.
And it doesn’t seem to be a temporary correction to Meta’s games budget either; more like a broader redefinition of what Quest, or rather VR Glasses, is supposed to be, as the metaverse simply isn’t company’s spiritual anchor anymore.
With VR Glasses for grownups coming next year, Meta is also planning to release VR avatars for grownups too, which feel more like a sober Zoom meetings than a magical metaverse full of people and things to do. It’s a decidedly Apple-like move, and I suspect it’s aimed at beating the Cupertino Fruit Company at its own game.
No Assurances of Quest 4 at Connect
Bosworth is a polarizing figure, but is also one of the more open windows into Reality Labs. He regularly hosts Q&A sessions on Instagram and runs the ‘Boz to the Future’ podcast. Few other Meta execs speak as regularly and as candidly about Meta’s XR direction.
Earlier this year, he said Meta had two VR headsets planned, and later noted in July that the company had “multiple” next-gen VR headsets in the works. One become VR Glasses, previously codenamed Project Phoenix. But what about the others?
Meta is constantly spinning up (and down) XR prototypes, so almost anything can be explained away. But when it comes to actual products, the company seems only talk about one device generation at a time.
It’s understandable why they wouldn’t talk about Quest at the unveiling of VR Glasses. Even so, VR fans looking for a flagship gaming device will have to wait longer than ever. Quest 3 is now three years old, which was the same age Quest 2 was before it came along and replaced it.
When asked whether there will be a future Quest headset specifically focused on gaming, a Meta spokesperson said this to Road to VR:
“We are continuing to explore a robust roadmap of VR devices tailored to different audience segments as the market grows and matures.”
Notably, that doesn’t promise a gaming-focused VR headset.
But Maybe…
None of this means Quest is dead. And I wouldn’t expect Meta to announce it either if it were the case. It’s probably more nuanced.
It’s pretty clear Meta is no longer positioning Quest to be the future of everything. It can easily remain a relatively affordable gaming platform, with a large enough install base and an established ecosystem for it to continue to make sense to Meta to keep the lights on and dole out nominal developer support for third-party developers.
So maybe Quest isn’t doomed. Maybe its stays commercially viable enough to survive even despite being strategically relegated inside Meta, which is undoubtedly looking at VR Glasses to help bridge the gap to its AR glasses. Those will likely be less gaming-focused, with a smaller field-of-view, and be all about agentic AI. Just like VR Glasses.
That said, VR Glasses’ success is not entirely assured. How well it does next year may determine whether Meta continues its gaming-focused Quest line, or coasts until Quest 3 and 3S stocks runs out. I certainly hope it isn’t the latter.
