Oh there are definitely people who avoid it because it's made by Meta. Maybe a bunch. On the other hand, it seems to be the most popular VR headset line by a wide margin.
It would be cool if Valve came out with a standalone headset, they're one of the few companies I can see that would be in a good position to do that: they already have a good amount of VR experience with one high-end headset + SteamVR APIs + a couple VR games, they have their own highly popular store/platform, they generally have a positive reputation with gamers, and they have a decent amount of hardware experience in general including the recent Steam Deck for mobile gaming hardware specifically.
And of course, a Valve headset would probably be significantly more open than the Quest. The Steam Deck has gotten some good reputation among more FOSS/hacker-oriented people for being fairly open: you can use it in a regular Linux desktop mode, you can install Windows (or presumably other OSes) on it, it's fairly repairable, etc. The default behavior is very console-like, but it's not very locked down if you don't want it to be. Best of both worlds, really.
TulliusCicero|2 years ago
It would be cool if Valve came out with a standalone headset, they're one of the few companies I can see that would be in a good position to do that: they already have a good amount of VR experience with one high-end headset + SteamVR APIs + a couple VR games, they have their own highly popular store/platform, they generally have a positive reputation with gamers, and they have a decent amount of hardware experience in general including the recent Steam Deck for mobile gaming hardware specifically.
And of course, a Valve headset would probably be significantly more open than the Quest. The Steam Deck has gotten some good reputation among more FOSS/hacker-oriented people for being fairly open: you can use it in a regular Linux desktop mode, you can install Windows (or presumably other OSes) on it, it's fairly repairable, etc. The default behavior is very console-like, but it's not very locked down if you don't want it to be. Best of both worlds, really.