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Facebook is officially killing off the Oculus Rift line

The company showed off its latest headset at its newly renamed Facebook Connect online event today, but they also revealed that they would be ending sales of the PC-based Oculus Rift S early next year.

Facebook will soon only be selling the new Quest 2, and pushing users interested in PC VR to tether their headset to a PC using the Oculus Link software, which the company debuted last year.

The shrinking of device offerings comes among an expansion of features for the latest Quest 2 headset, but also comes after months of crippling product shortages for the companys entire line of VR headsets, including its heavily hyped Quest headset, which has been unavailable or in low stock for most of 2020.

When Facebook unveiled the Rift S months later, they shared that, unlike the Quest, which is developed wholly in-house, the PC-based headset had been designed and developed with Lenovo.

At the time, Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell, who has since left the company, classified the device as more of an evolution of Rift than a revolution, indicating that the device was not a full sequel.

Its clear from todays announcement that Oculus intends to fully double down on standalone VR, while allowing users with gaming PCs to continue to access existing content and titles built for platforms like SteamVR.

When asked during a pre-briefing whether the company planned to scale back investment in PC VR content, Oculus Head of Developer Strategy Chris Jurney pointed to ongoing development of previously announced PC titles, while highlighting that creating games for Quest has kind of taken the lead from developers.

Original article
Author: Lucas Matney

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