Quest 3 will not replace Quest 2 for now, confirms Meta
According to the CTO of the company, you don’t have to worry about that quickly. “The games we announced in the Gaming Showcase are all playable on both Quest 2 and 3, and we expect that to be the norm for quite some time to come,” said Meta CTO and VR/AR lead Andrew “Boz” Bosworth.
He doesn’t rule out the possibility of Quest 3-exclusive or best-on-Quest 3 games, though: “Of course mixed reality and power titles could start targeting Quest 3 over time,” he adds.
That makes sense to me: after all, the Quest 2 doesn’t have full-color passthrough cameras that allow you to properly integrate your real-world environment into a game, unlike the Quest Pro and the new Quest 3. And I’d hate it for a potential killer app held back by the processing power of the Quest 2 – even though Meta has promised to improve the Quest 2’s performance with a software update.
But what I really wanted to know wasn’t “Will there be exclusive Quest 3?” but rather “Will Meta promise not to leave the Quest 2?”
If another data point, the latest Steam hardware survey shows that over 45 percent of VR headset users connect a Quest 2 to their gaming PC, compared to just over 2 percent using the original Quest.
Boz hasn’t yet answered my follow-up question about retroactively shutting down games (see below); I’ll update here when he does.