Can VR Survive This Inflection Point?

Long before the Meta headlines this week, I was already falling a little out of love with VR.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a “this is broken” way. More in a quiet, creeping sense that something had stalled. It showed up first in my content. Videos became harder to make, not because I was short of time, but because I struggled to find anything that genuinely felt like it was pushing the medium forward. I wasn’t forcing it, but I was noticing the gaps.

That was the odd part. I still had things I loved doing in VR. I still do. Watching 3D films I’ve converted on the PC. Playing Golf+ with a proper AMVR club attachment. Sitting in the sim rig for a race. Those moments still worked. They still felt good. But increasingly, between those moments, I wasn’t picking the headset up.

For a long time, I told myself that was just normal. That VR had matured. That maybe the honeymoon phase was over. But the more I sat with it, the more I realised it wasn’t that I was bored of VR. It was that nothing seemed to be happening that meaningfully moved it forward.

Everything felt incremental. Games blurred together. Hardware improvements were real, but subtle. Even when something was technically better, it rarely felt transformative. And that made it harder to stay engaged, not as a user, but as someone who spends time thinking about where this medium is going.

So when the Meta headlines landed this week, they didn’t cause the feeling. They just gave it a shape.

Sitting out on the horizon while all of this was happening was the Apple Vision Pro.

I didn’t suddenly want one. I still don’t think most people should buy one. But I started to notice that, slowly and quietly, genuinely interesting things were happening there. Not games. Not specs. Experiences.

The moment that really crystallised it for me was the first-ever NBA game produced live in immersive video. Not a flat stream in a virtual theatre. Not a novelty clip. A proper, spatial, made-for-the-medium broadcast. It felt like something new, not just something familiar rendered differently.

And that’s the thing, we don’t really have that on Quest.

We have impressive technology. We have capable headsets. We have a lot of content. But we don’t have many moments that feel like they could only exist because of the medium. The closest we’ve come recently might be things like the Coldplay concert, which I actually enjoyed. It was well done. But having to access it through Meta Horizon dulled the experience in a way that’s hard to ignore. The sense that you’re stepping into a platform first, and an experience second, never quite goes away.

What makes this more interesting is that Apple isn’t alone in thinking this space is worth serious investment.

Sony doubled down with PlayStation VR2, and Samsung has committed to its own XR headset in partnership with Google. These are not speculative startups or niche hardware makers. They’re large, experienced companies making deliberate bets. They’re approaching the space differently, but they’re all signalling the same thing: this category still matters.

PSVR2 is a useful example here.

It wasn’t trying to reinvent VR. It was a statement that Sony still believes immersive experiences are worth building for, even if the focus remained tightly on gaming and a single ecosystem. It is refined, polished, and committed, but it didn’t fundamentally change the trajectory of the medium.

And that, in hindsight, feels like part of a broader pattern. Even the best hardware releases were reinforcing familiar use cases rather than opening new ones. They were capable, well-executed, and often excellent, but they weren’t really expanding what VR could be.

Which brings me back to Meta’s approach. Not in the abstract, but very personally, because the Quest is the headset I actually own, use, and want to believe could be more than it currently is.

Meta has very clearly chosen the volume game, with a long-term eye on monetisation through Horizon Worlds. From a business perspective, there is a lot of solid logic in that. Get the hardware into as many hands as possible, build a platform layer on top, and monetise behaviour over time rather than devices up front.

The trade-off is that this strategy doesn’t naturally encourage “push the edges” thinking. For most Quest owners, gaming has become the primary reason to use the headset. Arguably more so than Meta ever intended. And gaming doesn’t naturally lead people into Horizon Worlds. Those two ideas were always going to struggle to coexist.

Seen through that lens, the cutbacks announced this week are actually a very logical business decision. If Horizon isn’t becoming the centre of gravity Meta hoped for, then refocusing spend makes sense.

The harder question is what comes next.

After the disruption of this week, it’s fair to ask where the Quest line goes from here, and whether it still has a long-term future. But before answering that, you have to step back and look at the state of the industry itself.

Meta has taken VR to the masses, more than anyone else ever has. But to do that, it has relied on comparatively cheap hardware. The Quest 3S in particular sits at a price point that makes VR accessible to a much wider audience. That’s a genuine achievement.

The problem is what that price point does to the rest of the market.

When devices as capable as the Quest are sold at such a low relative cost, it sets expectations that are very hard for others to meet. Companies trying to take advantage of advancing display technology, optics, sensors, and compute are forced to price higher and immediately feel out of step with what consumers have been trained to expect.

And that’s rarely good for innovation.

There will always be people willing to pay for a better experience. Some will even buy a Vision Pro. But it’s unlikely to be at the volume required to support sustained returns on investment across the industry. And that tension, between accessibility and ambition, is where VR now finds itself.

So where does that leave us?

If I look at myself honestly, I’m probably more excited right now by the idea of immersive NBA games than I am by the next VR game release. I’d love to see more native 3D content. More experiences that feel like they only make sense in this medium. That isn’t to say I don’t play games. I do, and I enjoy them. However, I don’t want gaming to be the sole definition of what VR is.

There are small signs of hope there. Disney recently launched its own standalone app on Quest, which feels like an important step. We don’t get the same 3D content on it that’s available elsewhere yet, but that doesn’t mean we never will. The fact that companies like Disney are experimenting at all matters.

There’s also still movement on the hardware horizon. Valve’s next move looms in the background. Lynx has an announcement coming soon. None of these guarantee anything, but together they suggest that experimentation hasn’t stopped.

So no, VR isn’t dead. Far from it.

Is it at an inflection point? Absolutely. But that isn’t something to fear. Every technology goes through this phase, the moment where early momentum slows, expectations collide with reality, and the shape of what comes next starts to change.

What that does mean is that not everyone involved today will still be involved tomorrow. That’s hard, and it’s sad for the people affected, but it isn’t unique to VR. It’s how technology evolves.

Whether Meta remains central to that future is still an open question. After this week, it probably feels more uncertain than it did before. But regardless of who leads it, I’m confident that VR, in whatever form it takes, isn’t going anywhere.

What is changing is what we expect from it, and what we want it to become.

And maybe that’s where the interesting part starts again.

If I had to say where I think this goes, at least from where I’m standing now, I suspect Apple may be closer to the right direction than it appears at first glance. Not because Vision Pro is affordable or practical, but because it places immersive experiences ahead of gaming as the primary reason for the medium to exist.

That same signal shows up elsewhere too. Samsung’s XR headset has now launched, and notably it doesn’t bundle gaming controllers as part of the experience. That feels intentional. Less about competing with consoles, more about positioning spatial computing as something broader, media, presence, and experiences that don’t immediately collapse back into familiar game design patterns.

That doesn’t mean games disappear. They won’t. I still play them, and I still enjoy them. But perhaps they stop being the gravitational centre. Perhaps VR grows by becoming better at the things flat screens can’t do, rather than by trying to replace them.

If that’s the direction things take, it may not look like explosive growth, but it might look like progress.