You should be able to play SteamVR games like Skyrim and No Man’s Sky on your Oculus Quest when Oculus Link arrives in November.
Facebook revealed this new feature at Oculus Connect 6 yesterday. The free update to Quest will allow you to play Rift games when you plug the headset into a VR Ready PC with a USB-C cable. During the keynote speech, Mark Zuckerberg said “all” Rift games could run on the headset this way. There was still some confusion, though, as to if this simply meant games on Oculus’ own store, or titles on Valve’s competing Steam store too.
We followed up with Facebook, directly asking if this meant Quest can run Steam content through Link.
“Yes,” a Facebook representative told us over email. “When you tether your Quest to your PC with Oculus Link, you will be able to operate the headset the same way you do Rift.”
If that’s the case, then this opens up Quest to not only the hundreds of apps on the Oculus Store, but also all of the Rift-compatible experiences available through Steam too. That includes high-profile releases like Bethesda’s Skyrim VR and Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky Beyond. We didn’t get to try this option for ourselves when we tried Link at Connect yesterday, though.
Facebook did add, though, that developers will be able to opt out of Link support if they so choose.
Unofficially, Quest owners can already boot up a sideloaded version of VR productivity app, Virtual Desktop, and then use its PC streaming feature to access Steam-based VR content. Link, however, could present a more stable way to do this; it’ll just need to be tethered to the PC.
We can’t help but wonder if that might mean we’ll soon see Quest show up on Steam’s monthly hardware survey.
