One of the original best games for Meta Quest 1 will no longer support the aging VR headset and will instead concentrate on later models.
The game that helped sell so many VR headsets back in the day, Beat Saber, is finally pulling support for the original Oculus / Meta Quest 1 headset, citing its lack of power and developing for newer tech as a better use of the dev team’s time.
Beat Saber has been a staple of virtually every headset since the Oculus Rift but with the Quest 3 performing so well in the last few months and bringing with it so much more power, it is perhaps an inevitable end for the Quest 1’s version. More pertinently it perhaps signals the actual death knell for the original standalone headset.
The official Beat Saber account on X posted: “Dear players, to focus our development efforts on our next projects within Beat Saber, we will no longer support Meta Quest 1 as of November 2, 2024. The game will continue to be playable, but Multiplayer functionality will stop and Leaderboards might be phased out in the future.”
Dear players, to focus our development efforts on our next projects within Beat Saber, we will no longer support Meta Quest 1 as of November 2, 2024. The game will continue to be playable, but Multiplayer functionality will stop and Leaderboards might be phased out in the future. pic.twitter.com/h7Jefa3g75
— Beat Saber (@BeatSaber) May 6, 2024
So it appears that while the game will remain playable in some form, Quest 1 players will lose access to multiplayer and, going forward, Leaderboards.
Over the weekend Beat Sabre was also made cross-playable meaning people (like me) who had bought it on the Oculus Rift all those years ago on PC could now add it to their Quest libraries for free.
For a game that has been out for so long Beat Saber really has been a bastion of VR gaming and recently received a Daft Punk music pack. It will be interesting to see where it heads now that the Quest 1 is deemed not powerful enough to keep up.
While most players were pragmatic, the response thread was still scattered with those upset about the decision:
“Guess I’m not playing Beat Saber anymore. Shame. I don’t intend to spend another 400 on a headset. Multiplayer is part of the playability factor. You take that away it’s like 50% of functionality that adds to the game vs. playing solo.”
The Quest 1 came out some five years ago in 2019 so is now showing signs of age, especially when compared to the Quest 3. It seems as though the headset is destined to disappear from our desktops now, rather quickly we would suspect.
