CheckMag | The Pico 4's wasted potential - Good hardware alone doesn’t cut it against Meta’s VR offerings

In 2020, Meta brought affordable Virtual Reality to the masses by releasing the Quest 2 headset. Its standalone nature made VR readily accessible to the common folk: No prerequisites, no tethers. Just put it on your head and play to your heart’s content. For the more hardcore gamers, it could link to a PC for high-fidelity PCVR gaming via the Oculus Link. At 20 million headsets sold to date, it has become the most popular VR headset on the market.

Chinese digital giant ByteDance closely watched Meta’s success story and concluded that the VR space would be a lucrative market to enter. Out came the Pico 4 in 2022, developed both to conquer the local market and to compete against Meta’s Quest headsets abroad. On release, it was within the Quest 2’s price range (€320) in its home continent, while European retailers priced it between the Quest 2 and 3, at roughly €400. Despite its affordability, it came with 2GB more RAM than what Meta’s budget offering had, higher resolution per eye, and pancake lenses for a wider view angle. Its creators smartly designed the battery to be placed at the back of the strap to balance out weight distribution. Like its Western rival, it also allows tethering for PCVR through the PICO Connect app (formerly Streaming Assistant).

All these nice-to-have features make the Pico 4 a more comfortable experience than the cumbersome Quest 2 out of the box. In the two years it has been available it’s become the go-to choice for budget-conscious gamers looking to experience PCVR for themselves. There is just one problem…

That’s not what the Pico 4 was made for.

ByteDance followed in Meta's footsteps when they envisioned the Pico 4. Like the Quest 2, the Eastern VR entry is sold at a loss in hopes that their standalone library, the PICO store, will turn a profit. However, what the PICO store offers already exists in the Meta store, and the latter’s big-name exclusives such as Assassin's Creed Nexus, Asgard's Wrath and the upcoming Batman: Arkham Shadow to name a few, only lure in more buyers to its storefront. The lack of unique content is what makes it difficult to recommend ByteDance's standalone headset regardless of how powerful its hardware is.

And so, the Pico 4 fell into obscurity because its lackluster game library let it down. Instead of becoming the Quest challenger its creators wanted it to be, it got relegated to the budget PCVR niche with standalone use capability as a secondary feature.

ByteDance had all it needed to rival Meta in the standalone headset market, but the Pico 4 shot itself in the foot with its subpar software. Interestingly, this is not the first time inadequate software stopped great hardware from thriving: Sony’s PlayStation VR 2 is another example. Reviewers praised its wearing comfort and its OLED display that allowed it to deliver astounding visuals, but a hostile price tag set higher than the PS5 console killed the fun entirely. It became a thousand-dollar buy for those wishing to experience an underwhelming library of exclusives - one that hasn’t grown since then. The result was an abysmal lack of sales which caused Sony to cease production and more recently, slash the PlayStation VR 2’s price and make it compatible with PCVR to target a wider audience.

There are two takeaways: Great hardware is nothing without good software backing it up, and Meta’s VR headsets may have grown too big to fail. The Quests had 5 years to solidify their position as the default standalone headsets, growing brand recognition, content library and exclusivity to appeal to a wide range of consumers. At this point, any future standalone competitor will have to be aware that they will be fighting a steep uphill battle against Meta, and their products may end up befalling the same niche fate as the Pico 4.