A few weeks ago, my son had a sleepover birthday party. Like any good kids sleepover party, this one involved a lot of video games. Everyone had gotten a Meta Quest 3S for Christmas and they couldn’t wait to play while everyone was in the same house.
AC thVRsday
In his weekly column, Android Central Senior Content Producer Nick Sutrich delves into all things VR, from new hardware to new games, upcoming technologies, and so much more.
Except they never got to play because of one bug or another. One headset lost tracking and refused to allow us to work unless it was in travel mode — something that doesn’t work when you’re trying to play a game like Dungeons of Eternity since it restricts movement. One of the other headsets refused to populate the friends list, making it impossible for them to join a game together. After an hour of troubleshooting, they all went back to their trusty Nintendo Switches for the rest of the night.
One boy, who had just upgraded from a Quest 1 to a Quest 3S, told me that he had never had problems like this with his first Quest, and he didn’t understand how Meta could make a newer product worse than an old one. While I understood the technical reasons for the problems he was experiencing — mostly problems caused by the extremely buggy v74 update — they couldn’t change the frustration he felt at the process.
The issue lies entirely in Meta’s seeming inability to conduct a proper QA process for its regular system updates. The company is too focused on shipping new features regularly than being concerned with delivering bug-free updates. In many ways, it reminds me a lot of the Google Pixel series of phones, which have suffered from the same type of problem since the Pixel 6, and it’s time Meta starts prioritizing stability over capability.
Ignoring reality
This year has been terrible for Meta Quest updates. There’s no mincing words. Back in December, just as folks were unboxing their brand new Meta Quest 3S headsets, a bad update to firmware V72 began bricking devices. The company acknowledged the bad update within a few days but did a poor job communicating the issue to its customer service team.
That meant that not only could people not use the headset they just received as a gift, but some customers had to fight tooth and nail to get a warranty replacement in the first place. It wasn’t a good first impression for new Meta Quest owners.
Not two months later, the V74 update rolled out, bringing amazing new features that could soon revolutionize immersive experiences. Except that the feature shipped with serious experience-breaking bugs. As evidenced in the official V74 testing thread on Meta’s community forums, a lot of people found the update to be less than satisfactory.
Meta is too focused on shipping new features regularly than being concerned with delivering bug-free updates, and that’s a huge problem.
One Meta Quest V74 bug keeps the headset from charging fully, stopping at 74% for some unknown reason. Players noticed that severe network lag all of a sudden caused PC VR games to be unplayable. Secondary accounts on the headset wouldn’t load games at all, and even after a “fix,” there are still severe issues trying to play games on non-primary headset accounts.
A new bug causes the UI to randomly disappear when waking the device from sleep. Despite being flagged during the two-month testing phase, it was never fixed before V74 was released to the public. I could go on with several more examples, but you get the point: Meta Quest firmware updates are buggy, and they’re causing people to get fed up with their headsets.
This doesn’t exactly look good for a company that is actively fighting to protect its image among VR enthusiasts while developers face a very real visibility crisis.
Meta Quest gamers expect to put their headset on and play the game they want. They don’t want to be bothered with troubleshooting or tinkering.
While it’s true that Meta has been working hard to outplay potential competitors in the space with rapid feature evolution, the company isn’t doing a great job of ensuring that existing users have a good experience. Mainly, that means having a stable experience.
One of the main reasons I stopped playing PC VR games years ago was because I was tired of the troubleshooting. Oftentimes, I would spend more time troubleshooting why a game wasn’t working than I would actually playing the game. I went so far as to sell my PC last year and replace it with a Steam Deck so I could still play PC games without all the driver hassles and tinkering. I just want things to work, and that’s why I play VR games on a Meta Quest.
Meta needs to remember that this is a gaming console. Like a Nintendo Switch 2, a PlayStation 5, or an Xbox Series X, Meta Quest gamers expect to put their headset on and play the game they want. They don’t want to be bothered with troubleshooting or tinkering. That nonsense is for the PC players who enjoy graphical fidelity at the expense of tweaking and tinkering.
It’s time for Meta to slow its update schedule down and ensure that updates are something people look forward to rather than fear.
As Meta moves forward with Meta Quest update V76, it’s time the company starts taking stability more seriously and letting new features take a back seat to a quality experience. That means the company needs to start fixing bugs before releasing new firmware to the public. If a major bug still persists, a firmware update should be delayed until said bug has been squashed.
But as I’ve said, Google is just as guilty of this sin as Meta. Whether it’s phone-breaking Android updates, weird storage and display issues, or even something as inconvenient as your morning alarm not sounding, Google’s phones often feel more like a testbed than a stable platform.
Any human-made piece of software is going to have problems or bugs that need squashing, but a regimen of monthly updates isn’t what the doctor ordered for a stable computing platform. Rather, companies like Meta need to slow things down a bit and ensure that updates are something people look forward to rather than fear.
When users are constantly looking for ways to roll back software updates, you know you’ve got a problem.
As the Meta Quest platform gains traction and becomes more mainstream, Meta must keep buggy updates away from its headsets. VR gaming already has enough friction without bugs and problems as it is without these silly, needless problems being added to it.
