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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention Meta abandoned the Quest 1 very quickly. I bought a game when it came out and never got around to playing it (had kids). I tried to play it recently and it no longer even works! £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck.

I guess I can't complain too much given that I got it for free.

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I bought an Oculus Go last year for € 30. Its support has been dropped for quite some time, and you can only activate developer mode and sideloading through an old version of the Meta Horizons app [1]. But if you do that, there are 71 GiBs of games to explore on the Internet Archive [2]. Some need patching to remove an online check to a server that no longer exists, but that is easy enough to do with a (regrettably Windows) tool someone published.

The Go is not the best headset of course, but the games are a different style because of the 3DoF tracking without camera's. Somewhat slower paced and sitting down. A style I personally like more.

You can also unlock the device to get root on it [3], which is quite neat, although there doesn't seem to be any homebrew scene at all. Not even the most bare-bones launcher that doesn't require a Meta login.

[1] That doesn't even seem intentional, but it does mean that once the old version of the app can't communicate with Meta servers anymore, any uninitialized Go turns into a brick.

[2] https://archive.org/details/gear-vr-oculus-go

[3] https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/unlocking-oculus-go...

That's not quite true - when did you get your free Quest 1? Only January of this year did Meta officially stop allowing devs to support those devices which IMO is not nice, but probably necessary to put resources towards newer devices since it was extremely outdated and very hard to keep supporting. The Quest 1 launched in May 2019, so it got almost 6 years of updates and if you have one, you can still install older versions of existing apps that choose to support it (which admittedly is very rare). I shut off support for my game back in 2024 when they recommended it, since the device is less than half as powerful as the Quest 2, very few users still had one, and the Q1 was a hard target to hit performance-wise vs newer devices. If you spend $50 to get a Quest 2 you'll get a couple years of updates or even better, spend $299 to get a 3S which is an amazing piece of kit and will probably be supported for at least 5 more years since it just came out.

> £30 down the drain, thanks Zuck.

I'm sure he put it to good use. Like 500ms worth of upkeep for one of his yachts.

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