Meta’s Cloud VR Gaming Plans for Meta Quest
Meta is actively working on bringing cloud VR gaming to Meta Quest. Its long-rumored “Avalanche” app briefly appeared on the Quest Store in October with old Oculus Rift games like Lone Echo and Asgard’s Wrath before Meta removed the app.
Alternately called Avalanche or Project Razor, this remote streaming service first leaked in 2022 and has popped up in code and experimental settings menus since then, before the recent leak spotted by UploadVR’s David Heaney.
Plutosphere from the Quest Store, as it did with Virtual Desktop before launching Air Link. Meta clearly intends to launch cloud streaming on Quest when it’s consumer-ready, enabling higher graphics than the Snapdragon XR2 on the Quest 3 and Quest 3S can natively handle.
In my case, I’m not sure if I’ll see Avalanche as anything more than a fun, high-latency novelty to briefly try unless Meta uses this service to expand beyond years-old Oculus Rift games.
Meta and Microsoft have brought flat-screen Xbox games to Quest via cloud streaming, but I want the partnership to go further. Avalanche would become much more compelling if the Quest streamed VR ports of AAA video games, fulfilling the promise that the PSVR 2 failed to deliver.
Challenges and Opportunities Ahead
It’s unclear whether Meta will rely more on traditional internet streaming or 5G connectivity for the final service. Just before its launch, Quest 3 FCC filings suggested Meta had tested a “5G scan” from a 10GHz 5G mmWave radio to the headset.
Meta’s official spec sheet for the Quest 3 doesn’t mention 5G, only Wi-Fi 6E; we assume the Quest 3S has the same standards.
In either case, the challenge for Meta will be the inevitable latency and high ping that comes with cloud streaming, depending on everything from your internet connection speed to your distance from Meta servers.
For traditional gaming, you can naturally adjust for the input lag, but any delay between your body/controller movement and avatar actions in VR leads to confusion and nausea, something I experienced myself when testing Plutosphere in 2022. Meta would need to use edge computing to combat this in some way.
The Future of Cloud VR Gaming
My pie-in-the-sky dream is for Meta and Microsoft to team up to pick up Slack and start streaming VR ports of its most popular first-person titles on Quest.
Meta already plans to sell a limited-edition Xbox-themed Quest with cloud gaming and Horizon OS headsets from third-party devs. It’s not that much of a stretch that Microsoft, which killed Hololens 2 and is reportedly considering an Android-powered MR headset that streams Windows through the cloud, might rely on Meta as a VR gaming partner, either directly or indirectly.
Imagine if Microsoft leased out Minecraft, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Forza, and/or Halo to be ported officially to VR (while keeping the gameplay the same). They could run officially through the Xbox Cloud Gaming app on Quest headsets, using either its own network or Meta’s upcoming Cloud Link.
Either that or Microsoft could make its own Horizon OS headset with Xbox gaming VR ports as an exclusive while still offering the best Quest Store games.
I have no idea what kind of legal and financial hoops Microsoft and Meta would have to leap through to make a partnership like this work; Microsoft could easily decide to stick to its own system, while Meta sticks to Oculus Rift games and future AAA “cloud-first” games made by its studio.
All I know is that most Quest gamers don’t need crazy graphical fidelity, or else games like Gorilla Tag wouldn’t be so insanely popular. What would make Meta Quest cloud gaming popular isn’t Asgard’s Wrath or Lone Echo, no matter how amazing those games are; it’s Minecraft.
Since Minecraft: Bedrock Edition will finally lose VR support in 2025, it’s high time we get an official, updated port from Microsoft on Quest. Even if we can only play it via the cloud.
