It was a little over a year ago when Facebook triumphantly announced that games and apps made for Oculus Go would live on in Oculus Quest. But now with Go long gone and Quest 1 out of production, the company has decided to no longer support Go titles through Quest 2.
Quest 2 has been in the hands of consumers for less than a week, and while there’s plenty of great content to play, some were left wondering where the dropdown menu for Go games disappeared to on Quest 2.
Legendary programmer and Oculus Consulting CTO John Carmack responded to one such complaint via Twitter, saying Go apps are indeed not supported on Quest 2.
“I totally lost the internal debate over backwards compatibility,” Carmack reveals.
If you haven’t followed the growth of Oculus over the years, among other things, Carmack was an instrumental force in both driving the company to build the smartphone-based Gear VR headset in 2015 and eventually crystalize that into the 3DOF standalone Oculus Go in 2018.
Launched nearly one year later, the original Quest included a compatibility layer that essentially made Quest report as a Go, which also allowed for Go controller emulation in older games. At the time it made sense to bring Go’s library of 3DOF games and experiences to help fill out the Quest’s comparably much smaller block of native content.
That’s certainly not the case today though, as Quest has managed to attract loads of developers looking to build for the headset, which generated over $100 million in app revenue in its first year alone.
Still, even with a boat load of Quest-native titles bringing near-PC quality to the table, it’s sad to see some of the legacy games that never got proper Quest ports like Smash Hit (2015) inevitably begin to fade away into what Facebook Reality Labs’ (then Oculus Chief Scientist) called “the good old days” in his 2015 Connect keynote. If you’re feeling nostalgic, you can give it a watch here.