Editorial: Meta Faces Real Competition From Pico

"Nearly four years after Mark Zuckerberg personally announced Oculus Quest the standalone VR market for consumers may have real competition.

Backed by Chinese tech giant Bytedance, the Pico 4 standalone VR system is coming to consumers in Europe, Japan & South Korea next month starting at just €429. That’s a startlingly low price for an all-in-one VR package which undercuts Quest 2 with superior specifications while delivering new features like color passthrough, alongside a store stocked with a growing list of some of the best VR games. Pico’s even secured its first major exclusive for the platform, Just Dance VR, coming in 2023.

Earlier this year we reviewed the previous Pico Neo 3 Link and called it “a decent Quest 2 alternative that signals bigger things to come”. More recently, UploadVR reporter Harry Baker briefly tried the new Pico 4 and we’re planning to review the headset properly in the coming weeks. Early indications suggest Pico 4 represents exactly what many developers and enthusiasts wanted — serious standalone competition for Zuckerberg’s Quest 2.

Analysts had suggested Pico 4 would take a play out of Meta’s own playbook and “aggressively subsidize” the system below the cost to make each headset. That appears to be exactly what’s happened. Facebook’s profit-deferring strategy had pushed would-be competitors like Lenovo and HTC to focus on enterprise markets where buyers are less sensitive to price than the value of not using anything connected to Facebook. Pico, too, had trouble here and after some early attempts at differentiating VR products it started selling to businesses-only before selling the whole company to the same giant that owns TikTok..." Lire la suite