Analog and gravity-based ones exist and only make you look slightly more like a tool than Smart Glasses

Valve could prevent this by doing it like the Steam Deck and requiring an x year old Steam account with at least y game purchases on it to be allowed to order one. Businesses aren’t going to grab secondhand consumer hardware to save a buck, and even if they are the majority of Machine buyers wouldn’t be looking to sell (and the margin necessary to get someone to effectively put the price of a Machine on layaway then ship it to some business and pay taxes twice will probably erase any gains the company would possibly see from using Steam Machines instead of Optiplexes)

“I have an oculus account”

Same thing. Facebook = meta = oculus. The ability to even have something called an oculus account is purely grandfathered in, lucky you for getting one in the good ol days and only giving facebook money once to use your headset as a pc display, but nobody else can do that ever again. It’s a “meta account” now.

“We don’t require a facebook account, we require a meta account”

“We don’t eat dairy, we eat cheese”

Can you install software directly to the device without a Facebook account? Can you update the device firmware without a Facebook account? If you buy a new one right now, can you play games on it without a Facebook account? Can it serve as a display for your PC without a Facebook account? Can you modify or alter the games and software installed on the system with third-party tools? If you get account/IP banned from Facebook for not providing/verifying your real identity when making the account, does your headset become a paperweight?

That’s what the “meta ecosystem” means. If you can’t operate the device without signing into a Meta account in good standing, the ecosystem is locked down. A corporation can break your toy whenever they want to. The Quest’s price to specs ratio is fantastic specifically because Facebook knows they basically have to undercut their competitors to that level to sell people Facebook accounts and make those people use their own software store, even if one or two Enlightened Individuals can manage to only make a Facebook account and use their store to download the PC connect stuff.

I personally consider the Quest at $500 to be an $800 headset that pays me $300 to make a Facebook account and that deal isn’t good enough for me.

Yes, but that’s Facebook. What i said was “either deal with Facebook or pay $900+”. Neither option is worth it to me for the novelty that VR provides. A Quest 3 at $500 or $300 with a completely open source operating system would already be on my shelf, but it’s Facebookware.

VR also isn’t worth “tradeoffs” like installing a proprietary streaming tool to kludge the Facebook thing into pretending to be a “standard VR” display. What Valve’s offering is something I can completely trust to:

A: not require any hoops to jump through to use with VR-capable software on my computer

B: work with any of that VR-capable PC software instead of requiring one locked down storefront (and the storefront it’ll be most compatible with is Steam)

C: work with any Android APK software on device, for the lower intensity VR toys like Beat Saber

D: be compatible with a variety of controllers and peripherals

E: not be connected to Facebook in any way

F: maintain an open source OS so that a community can fully maintain the software even if the original manufacturer abandons support for the device

For those promises, I’d buy in at up to ~$700. No other headset on the market currently fulfills this list for less than $1000.

The main (and big) reason to not touch Quest is Facebook. It’s Facebook hardware running Facebook software and everything you do is tied to a Facebook account. VR is a novelty, I don’t think it’s a novelty worth using Facebook or buying a $900+ piece of hardware for (and most non Quests have their own restrictions).

Plus as far as I know, Quest doesn’t work very well as a PCVR headset. So instead of my $2000 gaming PC, I’d be playing these ultra high resolution high refresh rate games on what’s functionally a phone. Frame is designed as PCVR-first.

I will say, Cyberpunk runs a lot better on the Deck than Clair Obscur does. Clair Obscur isn’t worth running on Deck IMO - frames drop below 30, hair and shadows are a horrible mess, and in the game’s first big cutscene that wasn’t an FMV it was so stuttery that it was making the music crackle. Completely ruins the game.

My steam deck is 95% docked gameplay. I love the ui, ux, cross saves, steam features, ability to play non steam games, and ease of use with the pile of controllers I’ve accreted over the years.

The same experience but it can run Expedition 33 at 1080p without looking like a framey disaster? Sign me up unless it’s ridiculously expensive. I’ve got no interest at all in buying one of the big 3’s DRM boxes, and building a PC for the living room is very expensive unless I’m willing to have it be a bigass tower. The cube is for meeeeeeee.

Well, you have to buy the game to try launching it without Steam. Or ask someone who did, of course. It’d be nice to know before buying.

Do note that the default shortcuts Steam uses are Steam dependent - they’re “steam://” addresses that tell Steam to load the game, not shortcuts to the game’s raw executable.

Steam notifies for third party DRM, but not for the games that do/don’t use Steamworks DRM. There are games on Steam that are completely DRM free and will launch from the exe file without Steam running at all, but there’s no way to tell if Game X is one of those other than word of mouth.