At launch next month, there won’t be any Oculus Quest 2 exclusive titles; everything you can play on the new headset will also work on Quest 1. But Facebook isn’t ruling out Quest 2 exclusives in the future.
Head of Developer Strategy Chris Jurney confirmed as much to UploadVR in an interview earlier this month. “Yeah, for the time being all the content will run on both devices,” Jurney said. “You can imagine a future world where it [Oculus Quest 2 exclusives] might start to make sense, but for now, the Quest is still a great headset. There’s a lot of folks in those devices and we and developers are super motivated to support those customers.”
Oculus Quest 2 Exclusives May Happen
Quest 2 packs Qualcomm’s XR2 chipset, which is a big upgrade from the Snapdragon 835 used in the original device. Some of this extra computing power will go toward managing Quest 2’s increased resolution and option for 90Hz refresh rates. We also asked Jurney if Quest 2 might see a PS4/PS4 Pro or Xbox One/Xbox One X situation develop, in which some games have better visuals on the new headset.
“I mean, obviously the new device is more powerful, so many developers are taking advantage of that,” Jurney said. “So in some titles you’ll see improvements on the new headset. In particular, the resolution, almost all titles take advantage of the added compute with increased frame buffer resolution, because the default frame buffer is higher on the new device.”
In fact, we’ve already seen some of those differences for ourselves. In an early demo of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, the Quest 2 version has increased foliage and even more objects stacked up in the environment that can’t be seen in the Quest 1 version. You can see more of that in our graphics comparison here. It won’t affect gameplay too dramatically — though more objects in the Quest 2 version does make navigating the environment different — but it does make for some nice visual touches.
What do you think about the potential for Oculus Quest 2 exclusives? Let us know in the comments below!
