What you need to know
- The 3rd Meta Quest Gaming Showcase takes place on June 1, 2023 at 10a PT, streamed on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch.
- The show will focus on the next year of Meta Quest games, and will have both pre-show trailers and a post-show roundtable with VR developers.
- Meta promises "more than double" the announcements as last year's Showcase, including "a major first-party title from Oculus Studios."
The 3rd annual Meta Quest Gaming Showcase is the closest equivalent that the VR gaming space has to E3 (rest in peace), so it makes sense that Meta has pushed the event from its usual mid-April slot to June.
Meta plans to make its early-summer event bigger than ever. The pre-show event will begin at 9:45a PT / 12:45p ET with indie trailers that didn't make the main show, followed by the main show full of "game announcements, gameplay first-looks, [and] updates to existing games.
The whole event should last about 45 minutes, and will be hosted by Oculus Studios Executive Producer Ruth Bram. It'll apparently host twice the announcements and trailers as the 2022 event, which had some major reveals like Among Us VR, NFL Pro Era, Walking Dead Chapter 2, and Ghostbusters VR.
There will also be a "post-show developer roundtable for a deep-dive conversation around some upcoming games" following the Meta Quest Gaming Showcase.
The short Meta Quest Gaming Showcase teaser video shows a horned helmet laying on a desert in the midst of a sandstorm. We don't know yet whether this teases a sequel to one of the best Quest 2 games or something brand new.
What we do know is that Meta is investing heavily in VR developers. This March, Meta announced that over 150 Quest games were in development under the new Oculus Publishing umbrella.
We also know that Meta's recent major layoffs have impacted several Oculus Studios brands like Ready at Dawn and Downpour Interactive, so we'll be interested to see how many announcements come from first- or third-party studios.
With the Quest 3 due to arrive this October, it wasn't clear if Meta would continue to focus attention on the Quest 2. Events like this make it clear that the aging console has plenty of life left, and we can hope that future Quest 3 games will also be backwards compatible with the current headset.
You'll find the Meta Quest Gaming Showcase on Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube, as well as Horizon Worlds if you want to watch it in-headset. It begins on June 1 at 10a PT / 1p ET, and it'll seek to prove that the Quest 2 isn't as dead as people believe.
