According to our sources, Meta will be shadow dropping an Xbox branded Meta Quest 3S on Tuesday, June 24. This follows a recent report from Windows Central that Xbox sidelined their first party handheld “Project Keenan” to focus on Windows 11 optimization for gaming and allocating more efforts into third party partner devices like the ROG Xbox Ally X.
What is the Xbox Meta Quest 3S?
Our source also claims the Xbox Quest 3S will be priced at $399. The contents of this release include a black and green headset with matching accessories, an Elite Strap, an Xbox wireless controller, and three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Internally, it will have the same standard system memory of the Meta Quest 3S at 128GB. Essentially, it’s a newly colored Meta Quest 3S with various Xbox add-ons.
In recent years, Xbox brought Game Pass to Meta Quest headsets with various titles like Forza Motorsport and Starfield playable on the headset through Xbox Cloud Gaming. This new branded device will not make any of those games natively playable, so you still have to rely on streaming through this route. Upon the launch of the recent “This is an Xbox” campaign, Meta Quest was brought up as a point of emphasis where they’d like to get more of their games playable, along with another place to access Game Pass. Xbox has never really showed any interest in getting into the VR market, but they love pushing Game Pass. Having the subscription on more platforms is a boon to them.
Xbox’s continued focus on putting their games on as many platforms as humanly possible is proving to be one that has resulted in a lot more sales of their games on platforms like PlayStation 5, but we have yet to see how this will impact Game Pass moving forward. With things like the ROG Ally and any VR headset being a very niche device, we would be surprised if there is any big bump in subscribers when these products come out.
