Facebook Is Discontinuing The Sales Of Its Cheapest VR Headset, Oculus Go

The entry-level VR headset Oculus Go will soon be no more available. Facebook, on Tuesday, announced that the company is discontinuing the sales of the Oculus Go this year. The tech gaint plans to go ‘all-in’ on upgrades to positions-tracking virtual reality headsets such as the Rift and Quest.

Facebook introduced the Oculus Go two years ago which is the least expensive as well as the least powerful VR headset sold by the company. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO Facebook introduced the Oculus Go back in the year 2017, which was a significant development for the company.

The company assured that the software will still be able for the Oculus Go. However, the company announced that after Dec 4 of this year, Oculus Store will not accept applications or updates. After Dec 18 of this year, those applications will not be added to the store. Oculus will continue to drive security patches and bug fixes for the Oculus Go through the year 2022. The Oculus Go is will be the last non-positionally tracked virtual reality headset sold by the company. Today, Facebook published a blog post confirming that the company will not ship any more 3DOF virtual reality headsets.

Facebook’s new move indicates that the company is responding to the feedback of users. The Quest had been very popular among users and it is still hard to find the stock. According to the Oculus team, the public made it clear that the six degrees of the freedom movement are the future of virtual reality. As a result, the three-degree Oculus VR headsets will disappear from the market. When the Quest was launched, the Oculus team decided to allow only approved software onto the Oculus Store. They were pretty aggressive in rejecting the developer’s efforts that seem to be too experimental. Some of the developers then decided to push people to ‘sideload’ the apps via unofficial means.

The Oculus team added that they were introducing a new way for app developers to distribute Quest applications outside of the company’s official store. This will not be available for users until early 2021, however, the Oculus team mentioned this now in hopes to spur development for the Quest among app developers who do not want to use the already existing channels.

It was expected that the company will discontinue the sales of the Oculus Go as it was already out of stock in various places. Those people will not be happy by the company’s decision who saw the $199 price of the Oculus Go as making virtual reality more accessible. However, it is no doubt that the Rift and Quest provide much more sophisticated virtual reality experiences as compared to the Oculus Go. The company rolled out the $399 Oculus Quest last year which became very popular among users.


Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

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