Meta's long-in-development 'Avalanche' VR cloud streaming system is now listed on Quest's Horizon Store.
UPDATE October 15: Meta has now delisted Avalanche from the store. The original article continues below.
The Avalanche app can be wishlisted, but not actually redeemed or purchased, and thus can't be downloaded or used. The store lists the app's release date as 24 July 2024, three months ago, which may be the time it was uploaded to the store system.
The store page description reads "Download to test out the latest cloud streamed titles on Avalanche", and its images include screenshots of Lone Echo, a blockbuster Oculus Rift game from 2017 that hasn't been ported to Quest, as well as Beat Saber and the Unreal Engine's City Sample.
To be clear, there's no direct indication of an imminent Avalanche launch, and this may just be yet another test.
David Heaney
The existence of Avalanche was first revealed in April 2022, when Quest firmware dataminer Samulia found a flag AVALANCHE_CLOUD_GAMING_INFRA_ENABLED, added in Quest v24. Version 24 shipped in late 2020, suggesting Avalanche has been in development for at least four years now.
One month later, two years ago now, a redditor posted a screenshot showing an "Enable Avalanche (Alpha)" option in the Experimental settings of their Quest 2, claiming they were able to get into the PC version of Oculus Home for around 15 seconds. YouTuber Brad Lynch claimed on X that the redditor directly contacted him about their experience, saying “they were able to get into a totally remote game of Asgards Wrath via a UK Wifi5 session”. The original Asgard's Wrath was another flagship Rift game, shipped in 2019, that also hasn't been ported to Quest - though of course it did get an even bigger scale sequel.
Four months ago, the same "Activate Avalanche (Alpha)" option appeared in the Experimental section of the settings of one of GAMERGEN's Quest 3 headsets during a livestream, though an "Unable to launch the Avalanche session" error appeared when they tried to launch it.
David Heaney
Between 2016 and 2021 Facebook invested hundreds of millions of dollars to ship a number of PC Oculus Rift blockbusters like Lone Echo and Asgard's Wrath. While these games can be played on Quest today via a gaming PC over Wi-Fi or USB, most Quest users don't own a gaming PC. Avalanche being listed on the store may suggest Meta is getting closer to releasing it as a product, bringing these games to a much wider audience.
Of course, the experience of cloud streaming heavily depends on the quality of the user’s internet connection. There is a potential for high latency if the server is far away, and for judder caused by packet loss if the connection quality is poor. In late 2020 John Carmack had this to say, comparing it to local network streaming: “obviously it’s even worse, obviously more people are going to find that unacceptable and it will be a terrible experience for more people, but still I am quite confident that for some people in some situations it’s still going to be quite valuable”.
In 2020 Facebook Gaming VP Jason Rubin described cloud VR gaming as more than five years out. But some Quest owners have been doing it for years now using third-party tools and services.
David Heaney
Virtual Desktop already supports streaming from a PC outside your local network, which some Quest owners have paired with Shadow's cloud PC service to play SteamVR games without a PC. PlutoSphere even offered a managed service with pay-as-you-go pricing via tokens, though it shut down in March citing Meta's ban on cloud VR streaming in its Quest Store & App Lab policies.
So if Meta does ship its own cloud VR streaming feature any time soon, it could face accusations of anti-competitive practices. It would be a similar situation to Virtual Desktop's PC VR Wi-Fi streaming, which Meta banned from the platform until just before it launched its own Air Link feature. In 2022 Bloomberg reported that the US FTC was investigating Meta's competitive practices, but there haven't been any further reports on the status of this investigation.
