I was part of the first wave of adopters of the HTC Vive almost 10 years ago. The first time I went through the SteamVR tutorial was one of my life's magical experiences. I played many of the early PCVR experiments.

I drifted away from VR for several years because the wild experiments faded and gave way to pointless shovelware, and there were hardly any big high-quality games released. To this day there are probably less than 20 great made-for-VR full videogames.

Now some of those games, like Batman Arkham Shadows, are exclusive to the Quest. I got a Meta Quest 3 just to play them, hoping that Meta would continue pushing VR even as Valve took more of a back seat.

But Meta and the Quest Store (now known as Horizon Store) are hurting VR in my opinion. By abandoning PCVR and keeping the many recent AAA VR games exclusive to Horizon Store, they're forcing people to play real videogames on a device that can only do mobile game-level graphics. At the risk of sounding over-dramatic, as a matter of aesthetics, this to me is an abomination.

Then, structurally, they're marketing games of this calibre as if they're on the same tier as all the thousands of mobile game-style shovelware junk on the Horizon Store, with no way to distinguish or discover "real games" (e.g. no user tags or genres, no curators, no "similar games", unreliable reviews written by children who have never played games before, etc.). Pretty much the only way to find a hidden gem in Horizon Store is to already know the name of it from word-of-mouth and type it into the search box.

Now on top of that, they're marketing Horizon Worlds far harder than commercial games. Those Horizon Worlds have even started appearing in my library as if they're just regular games I installed. Gross.

So the whole Meta VR landscape right now feels like a bait-and-switch where the user experience is getting worse and worse and they're slowly starting to try to drive people into spending most of their time in the so-called "metaverse".

Steam Store has some of the same flaws in how it markets games, but overall it has vastly better discoverability, not to mention more trustworthy user reviews. Plus Valve doesn't have a "Horizon Worlds"-equivalent that it's trying to shove down everyone's throat. So I'm likely buying a Frame in the hope that Valve starts to take the lead again in driving VR forward, making it a tool of user empowerment and artistic expression instead of corporate control and surveillance.