What you must know
- Meta’s Quest 3 Lite is reportedly not coming to China.
- Tencent supposedly partnered with Meta to promote the headset in China with the Chinese language firm dealing with providers whereas Meta dealt with {hardware}.
- The brand new price range headset is alleged to make use of the identical chipset because the Quest 3 with the remainder of the {hardware} being much like the Quest 2.
This yr may have been a trademark yr for Meta. A report again in November acknowledged that the corporate’s services may return to China for the primary time in 14 years, beginning with the Meta Quest 3 Lite, a brand new price range VR headset from the corporate.
Now, in response to a brand new report from Sina Finance (by way of UploadVR), Meta’s partnership settlement has fallen by and the corporate will not be promoting the Quest 3 Lite in China. The unique report detailed that Meta filed a partnership settlement with Tencent, the corporate that Nintendo at present companions with to promote the Swap in China. Meta would take among the {hardware} gross sales whereas Tencent dealt with video games and providers income.
If true, the information can be nice for ByteDance as its VR subsidiary, Pico, is at present being restructured to raised compete with Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional and different related premium-level headsets. That will imply Pico continues to function as one of the simplest ways to expertise VR content material in China. It sells a number of VR headsets at various worth ranges, just like the Pico 4.
The Meta Quest 3 Lite is probably going nonetheless in growth for different areas of the world, although, and would usher in a correct budget-friendly substitute for the Meta Quest 2. Whereas it is stated the brand new headset retains many design options of the Quest 2, it might characteristic the identical sooner Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset from the Quest 3, making it 100% extra highly effective than the Quest 2.
That will be nice information for builders and Meta, because the Quest 2 stays the best-selling VR headset even by the Vacation 2023 time interval because of its low worth of $249. The Quest 3, by comparability, retails for $499. A extra highly effective headset would imply that extra builders can transfer on to creating larger and extra advanced video games, that means we may begin seeing extra Quest 3-exclusive video games if the headset had been to launch someday this yr, as rumored.
The Meta Quest 3 is the most effective standalone VR headset you should purchase as we speak with tons of of video games and large developer assist.
