Xbox Game Pass On Meta Quest 3 VR: An Early Review

Meta Quest 3 with Game Pass

Andrew Williams

Xbox Cloud Gaming has launched on the Meta Quest Store, meaning you can play Xbox Game Pass on your VR headset. No console required, just an internet connection, a Game Pass Ultimate subscription and a compatible controller.

This is the kind of feature that could sway people into buying a Meta Quest 3, or an earlier model, as the Quest 2 and Quest Pro are supported too. But how good is it?

I gave it a test drive with a handful of games, using a Quest 3, to find out.

How to play Game Pass on a Meta Quest headset

Xbox Cloud Gaming is installed just like any other Quest app. You’ll find it on the Quest Store. You login using your Microsoft credentials.

Once booted up you’ll see a giant virtual screen hanging in front of your face with the Game Pass dashboard displayed, and a sort-of Xbox themed arena in the background. There’s a lot of that signature Xbox green going on.

Alternatively, you can use Meta’s hand-tracking pinch gestures to open up a menu that switches to the passthrough mode instead. In the Quest 3 and Quest Pro that means you’ll see your actual surroundings being the game display, relayed by the headset’s camera.

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These hand gestures are some of the flakiest parts of the Meta Quest experience, as clever as the digital-tracking is, but are pretty much essential. You use a Bluetooth controller to play Xbox Game Pass games, ideally an Xbox pad, not the Quest controllers. They don’t have quite enough buttons to replicate a gamepad’s inputs.

Below the screen is a set of buttons that let you choose how large the display is. Small, medium, large or extra large. The top two are naturally the most alluring.

Large is similar to what you might see when sitting fairly close to the screen of a good domestic projector with a 100in or so screen. “Extra large” gets close enough to filing your vision, like being in a good IMAX theatre.

Here are some of the good and bad bits of the experience.

Meta Quest Game Pass screenshot

Meta

The next best thing to actual VR

In the two largest screen sizes of Xbox Game Pass screen, this can feel like the next best thing to actual VR gaming. It’s superbly immersive in driving games and first-person title, even without 3D visuals or any form of VR control.

Forza Horizon 5 has a sort of intensity hard to reproduce with the average TV, because the Quest 3’s screen is able to fill your vision so much more completely. Similarly, you’re immediately drawn into Starfield.

These kind of games feel good the highest screen sizes, because there’s a sort of intuitive sense that what’s in front of you at the centre of the screen is often what you need to be looking at. In Psychonauts 2, a third-person platformer, cutting down the display at bit feels much more comfortable.

However, this is largely because at the top settings we’re talking about, the scale of the image is much greater than the default of the Meta Quest YouTube or Prime Video apps.

Image quality is good, not perfect

I tested Xbox Game Pass on Quest using a decent 225Mb home internet connection. It’s far better than the minimum recommended 20Mb but still a fairly ordinary domestic speed by 2023 standards. The experience was smooth, with no sign of it dropping down to a lower quality, as often happens when there’s an issue with the connection.

Image quality is good enough to make it feel you’re mostly doing justice to these AAA console games. But there’s still sign of the data-saving of video compression at work.

This comes across less in the sharpness of detail and more in textures, where the video feed introduces a sense of muddiness of obfuscation you wouldn’t see when playing natively through an Xbox Series X. Microsoft’s streaming is also limited to 1080p resolution, 60 frames per second, so there’s naturally a drop in all-round sharpness.

There’s also a trade-off here. Making the screen bigger helps to make the most of the resolution available to your headset. But it also highlights these streaming-related image compromises.

Make the screen smaller and you’re rendering your Xbox games with fewer of the headset’s actual display pixels. This may be why the least obviously compromised game I tried was Halo 2, as part of the Master Chief Collection. Its simpler visuals hold up well after compression and resolution loss.

Meta Quest Game Pass screenshot

Meta

Waiting feels longer with a headset on

Wait times may be one of the biggest barriers for Xbox Game Pass enjoyment among Meta Quest users. I only had to wait a minute or less for each of my test streams to load, but when streaming on console recently, those waits have been far longer.

Was I testing at a time of low demand? Almost certainly. But I wouldn’t be too surprised if Quest headsets were given some degree of streaming priority around this launch. Waiting for 10 minutes with a headset involved is going to feel much worse than doing so on an Xbox console — and that’s pretty bad in the first place.

Waiting for Starfield to cloud sync the data, which must have taken all of three minutes, felt interminable. Similarly, any frame rate or frame time issues stick out more significantly than they would on the average TV. Streaming also causes the Quest fan to start up fairly quickly, thanks to all that data coming into the headset.

Game Pass on a VR headset seems to jack up immersion and impatience.

Teething troubles?

If you decide to jump into Xbox Game Pass on Meta Quest, it’s a good idea to come expecting the odd bug or two. It is a beta after all.

I had some significant issues getting the app to recognise wireless controllers, and had no joy getting a cabled connection working at all. If you have the same issue, try restarting your Meta Quest 3 headset, as that fixed the niggles with an Xbox Series gamepad.

Early verdict

There’s plenty more Microsoft could do with this Game Pass streaming app. It’d be nice to get more virtual backgrounds, as the default one isn’t exactly neutral. There are some bugs to squash. And if there’s a platform that make great use of a boost to a higher bit-rate 4K stream (or above 1080p) stream, it’s the Meta Quest.

However, even on day one the experience of Game Pass on Meta Quest is a gaming gut punch, as long as you are not too particular about the technical particularities. And even then, the tech base here is Microsoft’s Cloud Streaming, not what’s on Meta’s side.

Gaming fans who own a Meta Quest should absolutely check this out, perhaps even more so for those who don’t own an Xbox (Game Pass comes with no minimum term, after all). And arriving just a couple of weeks after Steam Link, to make streaming PC games even easier, Meta clearly wants to make a play for the more serious gamers out there.

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