I would love to have an OLED Meta Quest 2 Pro, but it’s the right decision to cancel it now
This past weekend, we and others reported that the Meta Quest Pro 2 has been discontinued – or, more specifically, the in-development project that was “likely to become the Meta Quest Pro 2, but not yet officially called that,” to use semantics deployed by Meta’s own CTO in the past (and again recently) – and while I’d still like to see a Meta Quest Pro 2, this is probably the right decision for now.
The reason for the cancellation? The Apple Vision Pro – but that’s reportedly not because Meta is afraid of taking on its rival tech giant’s VR headset. Rather, Meta has struggled to offer high-end specs – primarily micro-OLED displays similar to what the Vision Pro offers – at a relatively affordable price point somewhere around or below the original Quest Pro’s $999.99 / £999.99 / AU$1,729.99 (via The information – the article is behind a paywall).
This determination to keep everything affordable is undoubtedly fueled by the first Meta Quest Pro.
While I thought the Quest Pro was a solid headset at launch, it was sorely overshadowed by Meta’s own Quest 3 – a device that Meta called its “most powerful headset yet” just six months after the Pro’s release, and which would later retail for a third of its original $1,500 / £1,500 / AU$2,450 price (and half the price the Pro dropped to after a few months on sale).
Meta hasn’t released exact sales figures for the Quest Pro, but the signs are that they’re not great, so it’s unlikely that making the successor more expensive than the Pro’s current price would improve things.
Meanwhile, while we don’t have official numbers, leaks and Apple’s stance on the Vision Pro suggest that their own headset also missed the mark in terms of the success they expected it to achieve. Nevertheless, the bold shoot-for-the-moon strategy that Apple employed has irreparably changed our perception of ‘Pro’ consumer headsets.
A Quest Pro – even one selling for a third of the price of the Vision Pro’s $3,499 / £3,499 / AU$5,999 – would be immediately compared against the Apple model, and any shortcomings (even valid ones) wouldn’t be considered acceptable. But as I said above, high-end tech inevitably leads to high prices that people simply aren’t willing to pay.
Check out Steam’s hardware charts for July 2024: the high-end but aging Valve Index comes in second, with 16.10% of users relying on it for VR games last month. Meanwhile, the Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3 and Oculus Rift S – affordable models in first, third and fourth popularity spots respectively – make up 39.66%, 15.65% and 7.46% of the usage share, each for a combined 62.77%. And more recent high-end devices only manage around 0.50% popularity (some even less).
A large part of the reason for this lack of popularity is that there simply isn’t a good reason to spend a lot of money on it.
VR’s chicken and egg
It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Because cheaper models are far more popular, it’s generally not worth the effort for developers to make a VR game or app that’s only for high-end, and as a result, almost every VR app currently available can run on low-end hardware, barring a few expensive and niche industry-focused services. This in turn means that there’s no incentive for headset buyers to go big, as they can buy a low- or mid-range headset and get largely the same experience as they would with a more expensive model, meaning those cheaper headsets continue to dominate the market, which brings us back to where we started and the reluctance of developers to invest in high-end apps.
Buying a high-end VR headset can feel a little like spending thousands of dollars (or pounds) on a high-end gaming PC with a 14th-gen Intel CPU, 32GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, when the only game it can play is Minesweeper. Yes, it might perform marginally better than a cheaper PC, but it hardly justifies the outlay.
To break this cycle quickly, we need to see something bold. I thought Apple would achieve this with the Vision Pro by making it a “wearable Mac,” but instead it opted for more of a “wearable iPad” that can only offer most Mac features if you already own an Apple computer – which kind of defeats the point.
Alternatively, we could see more platforms incentivize development through financial investment – perhaps for exclusivity deals like Meta’s latest approach on that front, with Batman: Arkham Shadow landing exclusively on its Quest 3. This approach of making software exclusive to high-end headsets could backfire, however; if the high-end model still fails to catch on, the manufacturer will have doubled down on a hardware and software flop – a terrible business decision, especially since the manufacturer could instead have focused on promoting the low- and mid-range models that have proven to be successful.
Instead, we’re left with the reality that we simply don’t need a pro-level VR headset right now, and few people want one.
I think we’ll get there eventually. As VR becomes more popular, the demand for high-end hardware will increase. And now that Meta is opening up its HorizonOS to third parties, we could see other hardware makers take a stab at making a Pro device. And with these running Quest software, they’d essentially be a Meta Quest Pro 2 in all but name.
It’s worth reminding ourselves that recent reports don’t mean the Quest Pro 2 is dead and buried, with some of the planned specs – such as eye-tracking – set to appear in other future devices (perhaps a Meta Quest 4 or Meta Quest 5). Furthermore, as Meta’s CTO has made abundantly clear, it’s a prototype that’s been scrapped, rather than the entire concept.
Even with “La Jolla” (the codename given to the canceled Meta Quest Pro 2) now on the shelf, another Meta Quest Pro 2 could release in 2027, or only slightly later than the leaked 2028 schedule. By then, we may have seen shifts in the types of headsets and software produced by Meta and the industry at large.; and regardless of when the Quest Pro 2 comes out, these changes should happen.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens, but we probably won’t have to wait long for a brand new Quest headset. Meta’s next VR hardware product is expected to take a completely opposite approach, in the form of the budget-friendly Meta Quest 3S.