Quests are a facebook data mining spyware machine, do you think they subsidize the low cost for fun? Why anyone would buy it, besides blatant ignorance, is a really good question. My opinion of Carmack has really cratered since he's been working at Oculus and peddling their anti-consumer adware crap.

Besides even the very top end headsets are still pretty early in terms of tech. Extremely narrow tunnel vision FoV that doesn't even come anywhere close to the 210 degrees required for full human vision, pixels visible on most and if they aren't you'll need an incredibly expensive rig to run those crazy resolutions at 90 fps. Games are also really pricey for what you get since they're targeting a niche market which by definition has to be loaded to be able to afford the setup anyway and has a sunk cost to justify. It's the console experience on PC. Plus you need to mount the trackers and find a way to manage that big fat cable for the headset, it's just piles and piles of expensive hassle for what's mostly still a gimmick.

I'm pretty sure it'll be pretty good a few generations of headsets in the future though, especially once on-the-level PC performance becomes more affordable and the game UX best practices improve. I'm glad the VR games industry is at least moving away from the dumb mandatory teleporting thing and letting people walk around normally now.

Ok, I wasn't making an argument for the Quest. I was making an argument against the idea that you need a $1500+ PC for VR, that's it. I don't have or want a Quest.

$300 is still a lot of money for many people for a single purpose device.

The most popular games consoles are the phones everyone has already, because they do other things, the game playing is effectively free. Not to mention that the games themselves have an upfront cost of $0 as well.

"Free" is hard to beat.

It's less than is required for high end PC VR that was suggested as the reason in my the comment I responded to. That was my only point.

The Quest 2 standalone route and the PS5VR route are both extremely limited options for "VR gaming", and that's saying something with how meager the PC VR video game scene is.

>The Quest headsets are standalone, only cost a few hundred dollars and are the most popular.

And you can't the graphic quality of a mobile game or need a extra PC to stream your content.