VR veteran studio Survios finally revealed Alien: Rogue Incursion, the upcoming single-player horror game that’s sure to pit you against some nasty Xenomorphs. The officially branded tie-in game is coming to Quest 3 later this year, but not any other Quest headset, which could signal waning developer interest in supporting Quest 2 and Quest Pro.
In addition to launching on PSVR 2 and SteamVR, a Survios spokesperson told Road to VR that Alien: Rogue Incursion is indeed “native to Meta Quest 3 only,” i.e. not Quest 2 or Quest Pro. Given what we know about where standalone headsets are headed, there’s a fair bit we can tease from that statement.
And it case you misses it, here’s the Alien: Rogue Incursion announcement trailer:
Alien: Rogue Incursion is slated to launch Holiday 2024, putting release somewhere around eight months out from the recent Quest 2 fire sale, which slashed the company’s last-gen VR headset to just $200, and discounted a ton of official Quest 2 accessories.
Now almost four years old, Quest 2 has been supported by practically all games available on the platform since the VR headset’s release in October 2020. The same goes for Quest Pro, the company’s first true mixed reality headset which launched in October 2022 for an eye-watering $1,500—later lowered to $1,000.
Both were timed around Meta’s respective Connect developer conferences for those years. However now rumors maintain Meta is currently working on some sort of ‘Quest 3 Lite’ follow-up that would imply a cheaper version of the company’s flagship, which would conceptually displace Quest 2 in its lineup. Maybe in… October 2024? We simply don’t know.
If this article were published a month ago, it would have been pretty straight forward story: Meta is ostensibly getting ready to sunset Quest 2 and Quest Pro to make way for Quest 3 Lite…or whatever it will be called, and has tipped off Survios to let them know to not waste time or effort on making sure their fairly big budget official Alien game runs on older hardware.
But there’s a new wrinkle in the story; Meta announced last week it will soon be licensing Horizon OS (ex-Quest OS) to third-party OEMs ASUS, Lenovo and Xbox, which are all very likely running on the same chipset as Quest 3, and possibly the prospective Quest 3 Lite too.
Survios hasn’t said as much, but that “native to Meta Quest 3 only” caveat probably only applies to the Meta’s specific Quest first-party product line since it’s obviously supporting SteamVR headsets and PSVR 2, meaning we may see a wider distribution across headsets built by ASUS and Lenovo, and the Xbox-branded Quest hardware—whenever those arrive.
A few things are certain though: as one of the most veteran VR studios out there, Survios has created a dizzying number of games over the years, including Creed: Rise to Glory, Puzzle Bobble 3D: Vacation Odyssey, The Walking Dead: Onslaught, Electronauts, Sprint Vector, Raw Data, and Battlewake. And if such a prolific studio thinks its time to shelve Quest 2 and Quest Pro to get the best possible reach out of its official Alien IP game, it’s likely other developers will follow suit.
