What you need to know
- The Meta Quest Plus (or Quest+) subscription offers free games to Oculus Quest 2 or Meta Quest Pro owners — and future Quest 3 owners.
- You get two Quest VR games per month, which you keep in your library as long as you stay subscribed.
- The first four Meta Quest+ games are Pistol Whip and Pixel Ripped 1995 (July) and Mothergunship: Forge and Walkabout Mini Golf (August).
- The Meta Quest+ subscription costs $7.99 per month or $59.99 per year, though you pay $1 the first month.
On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta's new VR gaming subscription service, Meta Quest Plus. With it, Quest 2 owners will get access to two curated games per month, similar to other gaming subscriptions like PlayStation Plus or Xbox Games with Gold.
Meta Quest+ will cost $8 per month, or $5 per month annually. Users must be 17 or older to pay for it, but one Quest+ subscription can be shared across multiple users on a single Quest 2 headset via app sharing. That includes teenage accounts or new children's accounts.
Once Meta Quest+ goes live, you'll see a Quest+ icon in the Store app on your headset. You can also find a Quest+ icon in the latest update of the mobile Quest app, in the Menu tab. In either case, you can subscribe or download your latest monthly games there.
The Meta Quest+ subscription isn't an ongoing library: you must be signed up in a specific month to get the two games on offer. If you sign up in August, you won't get access to the July games. And if your subscription lapses, you'll no longer have access to your redeemed titles. Thankfully, though, the Quest+ subscription will remember which games you've downloaded, in case you resubscribe later.
So you can subscribe to Quest+ one month, cancel the next month if you already own both games being offered, and then resubscribe a month later with no penalty. Meta's TOS specify that this is a legitimate option. So if you pay monthly, you'll want to keep an eye on the Meta Quest+ page at the end of the month to make sure you want next month's games.
The service is starting strong in July with Pistol Whip and Pixel Ripped 1995. Pistol Whip is a fantastic John Wick-like rhythmic shooter where you move down a corridor of armed foes, shooting to the beat of EDM music while dodging their bullets. Pixel Ripped 1995 is the third game in a popular retro arcade series where your character alternates between playing Atari-style classics and diving into pixellated 3D worlds.
In August, you'll get Mothergunship: Forge, a fantastic mecha roguelite that our reviewer called "impossible to put down," and Walkabout Mini Golf, one of our favorite sports games on the Quest.
Walkabout has added a series of epic DLC courses based on the movie Labyrinth, Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the classic adventure game Myst, and more. Since you'll be getting the game for about $4 instead of its usual $15, you can spend that saved money on some DLC courses if you want.
In other words, the Meta Quest+ subscription seems to be starting out strong, with some of the best Quest 2 games out of the gate. We'll have to wait and see whether it maintains that momentum with major releases (like PS Plus) or starts to rely more on smaller indie titles and duds (like Games with Gold).
Analysis: Meta Quest+ gets a tentative thumbs up
Aside from the fact that we genuinely like all four of Meta Quest Plus' initial games, the subscription itself looks like a genuine bargain. They cost $85 collectively at full price, already more than the price of an annual Quest+ subscription; even if you pay monthly, you're saving $71 total.
We can't guarantee that the game quality will stay as good, but you can easily unsubscribe in the app any month, and we appreciate that Meta isn't making you pay extra for a "family subscription" to share the service with other accounts.
To be fair, Meta Quest+ isn't a complete triumph. We likened it to Xbox Games with Gold, whereas we would have loved an Xbox Game Pass equivalent instead — one that gave you access to Oculus Studios games like Supernatural or Beat Saber, for instance. But maybe Meta was worried that it didn't have enough content to support something like that.
We do hope that, in addition to offering two games per month, Meta Quest+ will also offer some kind of discount on other games in the Quest Store. That isn't mentioned anywhere in the announcement page or TOS, but perhaps it's something Meta can offer down the line.
Generally speaking, we're excited for Meta to use this to highlight fun new titles like Pixel Ripped 1995 that gamers might otherwise have missed or skipped. Plus, considering how rarely some VR games tend to go on sale, Meta Quest+ looks like an especially good bargain.
We also like how Zuckerberg's announcement emphasized that this service will come to both Quest 2 and Quest 3. It's a good reminder that the games you get now will carry over to the new headset, which is set to arrive this fall with better graphics and backwards compatibility.
