According to a report from Reuters, Facebook is in talks with Tencent Holdings to distribute its Meta Quest virtual reality headsets in China. The discussions between the two companies began last year and are still in the early stages. If successful, this would mark the first entry for a Facebook product in the Chinese market, where the company is currently banned along with several other US companies.
Tencent, the world’s largest video game publisher, had previously planned to develop both virtual reality software and hardware through its XR unit. However, due to profitability issues, the company has decided to halt its own XR hardware development and has asked most employees in the unit to seek other opportunities. Tencent’s main rival in the Chinese virtual reality market is ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, which also owns the headset manufacturer Pico. In August 2021, Tencent and ByteDance engaged in a fierce battle to acquire Pico.
Meta Quest, formerly known as Oculus Quest, is the virtual reality headset line produced by Meta Platforms Inc (formerly Facebook). Oculus was founded in 2012 and acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. Since then, Oculus has released several variants of its headsets, including Oculus Go, Oculus Quest, and Oculus Quest 2. The recent rebranding has renamed these headsets as Meta Quest or Meta Quest 2.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced earlier this month that the company’s next-generation consumer headset, featuring improved mixed reality technology, will be launched later this year. Zuckerberg believes that this technology will set the standard for all future headsets and eventually for augmented reality glasses as well.
