As highlighted in our Meta Quest 3 review, the new VR headset is bringing a lot of improvements to the VR world, but for Oculus Quest 2 owners it’s also bringing one major downside – your headset’s storage space might soon feel a lot smaller than it did before.
To take advantage of the Quest 3’s improved Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset, its 8GB of RAM, and its full-color mixed reality, VR app developers will be releasing updates to their software (Meta said it’s coming to over 50 during Meta Connect 2023). However, as reported by UploadVR, these updated files won’t be exclusive to Quest 3 owners.
People using a Quest 2 will also be forced to download the new, larger file sizes, but here’s the kicker: they won't be able to benefit from any of the improvements stored in those bigger files. And the size increases aren’t insignificant – for example, Red Matter 2 is jumping from 5.6GB to 9.1GB.
Just under 3.5GB might not seem like a lot, but if you’ve been a long-running Oculus Quest 2 user and have an original 64GB model (as this writer does) then 3.5GB is 5.5% of your total storage space – or 6.2% of the available space after you factor in the 7.5GB taken up by the Quest 2 OS.
Thankfully this might not be an issue forever. While developers currently don’t have the option to release distinct Quest 2 and Quest 3 versions of their VR experiences, they can release a separate, simplified version for the Quest 1.
Meta didn’t provide an exact timeline, but it did reportedly tell UploadVR that it has plans to “extend this [facility to release distinct versions of apps] to Quest Pro and Quest 3 in the future.” So hopefully Quest 2 owners will soon be able to reclaim any storage space that has been snatched away from them.
In the meantime, be prepared to have to delete some apps from your Quest 2’s digital library. Alternatively, you could check out the Meta Quest 3 and see if it’s worth upgrading too – if you have to download the bigger files, you might at least take advantage of the benefits they bring.
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