A budget-friendly Meta headset may be coming! But could this deal with Tencent keep it in China?

Some of the best VR headsets ever made were crafted by Meta. And Zuckerberg’s company has gained the reputation of an industry leader when it comes to XR, regardless of how well the Metaverse is doing. Because the important thing is that the Quest 3 is awesome!

Since this latest headset launched, Meta’s other products: the Quest 2 and Quest Pro have gotten price cuts, sure, but that doesn’t really make them solid budget-friendly options. And in order for Meta to achieve its goal of making VR more popular, a budget-friendly headset needs to be considered.

And that’s probably why we’ve been hearing all of these rumors of a cheaper Quest headset coming sometime in the future. But this new report puts that entire rabbit hole into a whole other perspective.

Because Meta’s first budget-friendly headset is going to be a result of a deal with Tencent. So does this mean that it’s never going to be sold in the west?



By the way, this entire thing is kind of funny. You might’ve forgotten all about this, but Meta’s primary products — Facebook and Instagram — remain blocked in China, so it’s kind of ironic that the company is making a return there through its VR products.

Essentially, the report claims that a deal has been made between Meta and Tencent — yeah, that Tencent! — with the ultimate goal of creating a new, low-cost XR headset. For which Tencent would be the exclusive seller in China.

So, what does this mean? For starters, it means that while headsets like the Pico 4 can’t really compete with Meta here in the west, Meta can go to the east and start acting as a competitor to Bytedance’s company. If it survives its turbulent period, that is.

And, just as a reminder: Bytedance is also a competitor to Tencent in China, so this collaboration makes all sorts of sense. But will the partnership prevent this new cheaper headset from reaching western markets?

Well, according to the source, not really. The plan is to have the cheaper Quest headset sold overseas too, but we’d rather wait until we know more before we set that in stone. Speaking of which, what do we know for the time being?

Ahem:

• The lenses are probably not going to be that great

And that’s about it for now! Naturally, that itself could translate into other things too, such as loss of MR features. But in order for such a product to exist, some corners have to be cut. And time will tell if it was worth it or not.

At this point, the one thing we’ve learned is that people really like eye-tracking, so let’s hope that the headset features that!