If you have had a VR headset for the past couple of years you are aware of the new surge of quest and quest 2 users. Some people even call it a plague or virus because of how fast the new quest players are spreading, But why are there so many new quest users? Well, in short, the quest has an unbelievably low price with specks that are still good enough that it holds a good frame rate and good motion tracking. Thit is unbeatable by the competition over at Valve and HTC!

To understand how big of a difference this makes you must first understand how much VR cost to get into before the quest. If you want to buy a valve index (one of the more popular and higher-end headsets) that will take an initial fee of 999$ and that does not include any games or a PC capable of running VR if you don’t have one already. Some headsets are cheaper than the vale index like HTC Vive and the oculus rift at 599$ and 799$ respectively, but they don’t get rid of the price of a pc which can cost you a couple thousand of dollars for one that will run smoothly. That’s where the quest prevails not only is it a stand-alone headset meaning it doesn’t need a pc to work, it will also only cost you 300 flat which halves the oculus rift and is a third of what the valve index cost. Because of this roughly 32% of steam vr users are now quest users. (more users than any other VR headset of this time)

But how does oculus keep such a low price? It’s a mix of things. For one, oculus is a company owned by Facebook, a multibillion-dollar company. This means that Oculus doesn’t have to worry about marking the price of the quest up because it’s not the only or main source of income for Facebook. For two, the quest sacrifices some convertibility to cut costs. One of the better examples of this is by looking at the quest one and twos head strap. The head strap for the quest 1 is a stable plastic head strap while on the other hand the quest 2 has an uncomfortable cloth head strap. 

  The silent downside to the quest 

No matter how glorious the quest may be, there is one downside to buying a quest and it has to do with how Oculus is owned by Facebook. If you want to actually play your newly bought quest you can’t just make an oculus account anymore, you got to have a Facebook account. This is not good for the quest and its users for a couple of reasons. Most of them are connected to the idea that if you lose your Facebook account by getting banned you lose your quest account and all the games you have spent your valuable time and money on. You can’t make a fake account either because if you get caught with a fake account you get permanently banned and lose all your games. This is also a downside because a lot of people don’t trust Facebook and they don’t want to have to put up with Facebook, you can’t get the quest.

If you get on VR chat or any other social VR game it is common to hear people making jokes about Facebook and the quest. and I understand, I would be salty if I had to fork over my kidneys for a VR headset just to have someone buy one for money that got from cutting grass for a week. but, All jokes aside, I do believe that the quest should bring back the oculus accounts and have linked to Facebook an option but I’m afraid this will never be the case. You see the more people that have Facebook and are getting advertised to the more money that Oculus and Facebook make.

So how does this affect the space of VR? 

  The effects of the quest are more or less straightforward! By the quest having such a low price and being easy to set up it has attracted not only a lot of hardcore gamers but, a bunch of everyday people as well. This is big because before not a lot of people who wanted a VR headset could not get one because of the cost of entry but, now that that price is lower it is much easier to get into VR. However, this is not the only way that Facebook and Oculus have affected VR as a whole. Facebook’s entry into VR has inspired other big companies to join the VR race. Currently, Apple is working on their own VR headset, expecting to come out in 2022 and if that also does well like the quest has, who knows, Samsung and Microsoft might come out with their own VR headset and accessories.

If this is to happen then the competition in the VR market will become tense and more competitive. Then if the competition becomes more competitive it will be good for people who love VR like myself because it will make companies like HTC and Vale have to lower their prices, improve specs, and overall make the VR experience better if they want people to buy their headsets! And who knows maybe with the way things are going maybe VR will be an addition to human life like how smartphones are, but who really knows. Only time will tell