So Meta is basically selling these headsets at the loss or near loss, IIUC, hoping to make it up on building network effect, tech and the store fees, as usually these sorts of hardware platforms do, and then Valve comes in and effectively hijacks the platform turning it into an accessory for the SteamDeck.
As someone that happens to own both (I love the SteamDeck, think as a VR a gimmick) I need to try it out soon.
> So Meta is basically selling these headsets at the loss or near loss
Nope, they can't sale at loss, to my knowledge EU regulations forbids that, unless it is a seasonal sale. Then there is a question of what is near loss margin, because it feels to me like if you don't go 50-150% margin on your product nowadays you're considered a looser selling "near loss".
No details, I'm not a lawyer nor accountant. All I know is that there anti dumping laws and these are to prevent selling goods with loss as it can be a strategy to dominate market by killing domestic products with lower price. I also know that there are exceptions for seasonal sale. That is it.
You don't need to jailbreak them. The Quest natively supports APK sideloading of any app you want, there's even a popular secondary store/marketplace aptly called Sidequest where a lot of free and paid VR apps that don't fit Meta's rules get published.
I still wish I could jailbreak them so I could purge their egregious telemetry. Collecting VR telemetry in particular, details that can be gleaned and inferred about your physical body and physical activity, really creeps me out.
It's the only reason I haven't bought into VR again yet (I was on the train with the original HTC Vive for a couple years but that headset has aged).
I've played the quest and I'm very impressed with it hardware and experience wise. I'm still waiting for a comparable option that has:
- open source / jailbreak capability for full device control
- stream higher spec games from PC
- the ergonomics, ease of use, and portability of the quest headset
- reasonably priced
Once that headset arrives, I will probably get sucked back into VR
The comment is arguing that if Meta were to change the rules, they could easily block such sideloading of APKs by pushing out a simple system update. I don't think they will given the backlash, but the possibility is there.
Surely Meta employs software developers who can remove any feature from Android they want? Or is blocking side loading specifically disallowed by Google for some reason?
>and then Valve comes in and effectively hijacks the platform turning it into an accessory for the SteamDeck
That's kind of missing the point. The point of the Quest is that it's a self contained gaming console inside a headset similar to a Steamdeck you can put on your face, making the purchase price of a whole VR setup lower(many Quest buyers don't also have a gaming PC)
And also streamlining the VR experience where you just put the Quest on your face and you're instantly in the game, you take it off throw it on the couch and everything's paused ready to be immediately resumed when you put it back on next time, no need to fiddle with cable tethers that limit your 360 mobility, and launching apps from your PC and taking care to save/load everything externally and fiddling with graphics drivers, the whole hassle of maintaining a gaming PCs, etc.
The Quest did to VR gaming what Steam and SteamDeck did to PC gaming: streamline the game purchasing and playing experience for the casual users.
Not working from Linux hosts, unfortunately. After the news, I pulled my Quest 2 out for the first time this year, spent an hour getting it to update which required being re-paired to my Oculus dev account via a smartphone app (why?), and was unable to link the app on the headset by pin the way Steam Link works everywhere else.
ALVR and Virtual Desktop both worked for me on Linux previously, but they weren't the greatest experience. I was really hoping this would finally bridge the divide in experience.
This is good news, currently both Steam VR and Meta's Link stuff runs in parallel both with their own pop-up UI and settings. Just using Steam simplifies things a lot.
The folks at ALVR (another vr streaming client/server) are doing something similar, but are open source :
https://github.com/alvr-org/alvr
They also achieve very low latency, I didn't follow every single optimization they added but it basically boils down to a few encoding tricks (better image in the center, accept blurriness in the peripheral vision), good network infrastructure, and hardware decoding / encoding being really fast.
As someone that happens to own both (I love the SteamDeck, think as a VR a gimmick) I need to try it out soon.