The Oculus Quest 2 can’t play the selection of Oculus Go games made available on the original Quest, John Carmack confirmed.
While Quest 2 has full backward compatibility support for every game and app that released natively for the standalone headset, there’s no option to access any of the titles available on Oculus Go and Gear VR. Around this time last year, Facebook made about 50 Go games compatible on Quest. You couldn’t buy these games from inside the headset itself but, if you already owned them, you could download them via a separate tab in your library.
But that tab is nowhere to be found on Quest 2 and, in a tweet yesterday, John Carmack confirmed Go support had been dropped for Quest 2, despite his protests. “I totally lost the internal debate over backwards compatibility,” the developer said.
Go is a standalone headset like Quest, but only features simplistic three degrees of freedom (3DOF) tracking. That means you can’t physically move your head and hands through virtual space, just tilt them to look around or point at things. Earlier this year, Facebook confirmed that it would stop selling Go, however, just like it confirmed it would no longer sell Rift headsets last month.
On Quest, some of the selection of Go apps had access to 6DOF controls (though some were still limited to 3DOF too). There were some great experiences on the list, like Coatsink’s A Night Sky and ustwo games’ Land’s End. With no Oculus Go support on Quest 2, it appears apps like these will truly be lost to the past.
What do you make of Oculus Go games not working on Quest? Let us know in the comments below.
