This Week in VR: Quest 2 Gets a Send-Off, PS VR2 Leaves Sony's US Store, and PAYDAY Pulls Its First VR Heist

Two of the headsets that carried this hobby through the 2020s started walking toward the door this week. One got a farewell letter, a timeline and a list of everything that stays switched on. The other just stopped appearing on its maker's US store, and as of Friday nobody at Sony has said a word about it.

I own one of them, a launch-week Quest 2 that has spent the last three years in a drawer.

The Quest 2 gets a proper send-off

Meta told developers on Monday that Horizon OS v2.13 is the final feature release for Quest 2 and Quest Pro. It starts rolling out in January and reaches every headset by March 2027, security patches run through December 2027, and then the software stops. The store stays open. Link keeps working. Developers can keep shipping new Quest 2 games right up to the last patch. I went through the whole thing on Tuesday, including how much rougher the original Quest had it, so I will leave it at one number. The Quest 2 was still 22.23 percent of VR headsets in Valve's October survey. More than one in five. For a headset from 2020, that is a lot of people still wearing it.

The software keeps moving in the meantime. The Horizon OS v2.10 Public Test Channel build adds a Theater environment, UploadVR found, a large home-theater room you launch from a button on the window you are watching, and it already works with YouTube, Disney+, Prime Video, the browser and the system media player. It is a beta. Features in the PTC sometimes change before the stable release, and occasionally they vanish.

PS VR2 drops off Sony's US store, without a statement

Sony did it the other way. PlayStation Direct in the US no longer lists PS VR2 at all, and the old product link now returns a 404. Road to VR reported it on Tuesday, and Alex dated it on Wednesday: the Internet Archive has the page live on October 8 and gone by October 12. Japan's store looks the same. The UK and EU stores still sell it at list.

Sony has not said it is discontinued, paused or restocking. Best Buy's third-party sellers want roughly $750 for a headset that lists at $399.99, and Alex's advice is the one I would give a friend: do not pay that. The odd part is that the software side is carrying on as if nothing happened. Sony's Black Friday sale started Wednesday and runs through November 30, PS VR2 games included, and two new games came out for the headset on Thursday. Zero Caliber 2 Remastered is live on the US store at $24.99, running at the native 90fps XREAL Games promised in October, and Triangle Factory scheduled its 32-player shooter Forefront for the same day with cross-play against Quest and PC.

If you already own a PS VR2, nothing changes this week. If you were planning to buy your first one in the US this Christmas, Sony is not the place to buy it right now.

Meanwhile on Steam

The Steam Frame reached 5.49 percent of VR headsets in Valve's October survey, about 1 in 18 and fifth on the list, in its first full month and still behind a reservation queue. Valve first published that row at 4.13 percent and raised it a few days later. Alex's piece is still worth reading for the second half: even at the higher number, the Frame accounts for only about a fifth of October's jump in Steam's VR share, and a swing in Simplified Chinese survey responses seems to explain more of it. My 1TB waitlist spot still has no date.

Two fixes for people already playing on PC. NVIDIA's driver 621.01, out since October 21, turns out to fix the bug that could freeze Meta Horizon Link over USB, 233 days after driver 595.71 introduced it, although Meta's own help page still tells NVIDIA owners to roll back to an old driver. And Valve's SteamVR 2.19.1 beta raises Steam Link's default render resolution and gives the Frame a bigger encode. If you rolled back in the spring and forgot, now is the time to update.

PAYDAY, in a headset, finally

PAYDAY: Aces High came out Thursday at $24.99 on Quest 3 and 3S, Steam and Steam Frame, with cross-play across all of them. Fast Travel Games built it as the first PAYDAY made for VR from the ground up. Four-player co-op, six heists at launch, a seventh free heist on the roadmap for December. It is also in Meta Horizon+ this month, alongside Assassin's Creed Nexus, so a lot of Quest owners already have it.

I put a lot of hours into PAYDAY 2 on a flat screen, and I have not played Aces High yet. What gets me in UploadVR's review is how physical it is. You pull a magazine and slam it into the gun yourself. You twist a safe dial with your fingertips. When a crewmate goes down, you grab a syringe and plunge it in. In PAYDAY 2 all of that was a button.

The reviews split. UploadVR calls it "VR's best new co-op shooter." Road to VR's review likes the missions and the look but says flatly that it does not recommend playing solo, because the enemy AI falls apart when nobody is talking to you. Both can be right at once. Read together, they describe a heist movie when your crew talks and a game with pretty dim guards when it does not.

Two smaller things for this weekend. Synth Riders added an 80s pack called Vice Wave for $13.99, with Duran Duran, Bryan Adams and Cutting Crew's "(I Just) Died In Your Arms" on it, which is reason enough. And if you already have a PS VR2, Sony's Black Friday discounts on its games reach 75 percent.

Glasses, and who gets to wear them

The smart glasses story got more political this week. In a Westminster Hall debate on Wednesday, Home Office minister Satvir Kaur told MPs that the UK government is "already looking into options to restrict smart glasses in certain settings and restricting the sale to certain users," according to the official record, and that the work is happening "at pace." No product, no timetable, no definition of "certain users." Sam's piece covers what MPs actually proposed, including a call to bar sex offenders from buying them and to outlaw modifications that hide the recording light. That comes a week after two US senators gave Meta until November 25 to answer nine questions about the same product.

The glasses are coming anyway. Warby Parker's quarterly earnings release, filed with the SEC on Thursday, says preorders for its first Intelligent Eyewear collection open on November 12. That collection is the Samsung-built Android XR audio glasses. Jordan read the filing: no price, no countries, nothing from Samsung yet. On Monday he also covered Google Play opening to apps for audio glasses, through the ordinary phone release track. And on Friday, Gentle Monster said its own collection launches in December.

VRChat says no to an AI label

VRChat surveyed its users about labeling AI-generated content, and according to Automaton, as reported by Road to VR, around 95 percent of more than 21,000 respondents wanted one. VRChat said no. Its reasoning is that some creators would lie, and that a label would set off "sleuthing" and harassment of people who never touched an AI tool. It will ban AI-generated thumbnails that misrepresent a world, it is adding likes and dislikes for worlds, and it is still deciding whether to offer an optional "Human-authored" mark instead. Users answered with a review bomb on Steam.

I get the harassment worry. Anyone who has watched a creator get accused of using AI over a hand-drawn texture knows it is real. But when 95 percent of the people you asked tell you what they want, "we thought about it" needs to come with more than a maybe. An optional human-made mark is a decent start. I would ship that one quickly.

Around the industry

Schell Games cut about 40 percent of its staff, its second round in ten weeks, and Alex's piece today covers what that could mean for I Expect You To Die 3, Among Us 3D and the Dragon Grove game it announced at Connect. On the defense side, Sam has Varjo moving all XR-4 production to Espoo from January and piloting counter-drone training with the Finnish Defence Forces. And Nina dug into Three-Live, a small open-source Google project that turns AI-written Three.js into GLB and USDZ files inside a sandbox, so the generated code never runs in front of a user. If you build for WebXR, that one is worth a look.

Next week

Thursday, November 12 is the busy one. Warby Parker's preorders open, and Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars, the mixed reality piece built on Andy Weir's novel, launches on Quest 3 and 3S, Pico and Android XR the same day. You play Ryland Grace, the ship is failing, and Rocky helps you fix it. The week after that, Sega shows House of the Dead: Reawakened at IAAPA in Orlando on November 17, and Meta's deadline to answer the senators is the 25th.

If you are still on a Quest 2, PAYDAY is the big release this week that skips you, since it is listed for Quest 3 and 3S only, and Project Hail Mary next Thursday is the same story. Meta is letting the old headset down easy. The new games have already moved on.