Hardware is difficult and expensive to make, and consumers are very price-sensitive.
In a world where everyone has a service subscription or a data hose to subsidize their hardware (see: most phones, game consoles, kitchen appliances, "smart assistants"), it's very difficult to be competitive just making hardware.
Given that the Oculus Quest is effectively a flagship phone with a strap attached to it at ~1/10 the sales volume of a flagship phone (rough figures: [0] [1]), it would be very difficult to even pay engineering expenses without a secondary income stream enabled by a) real-identity advertisement targeting/data sucking and b) ecosystem lock-in.
In a world where everyone has a service subscription or a data hose to subsidize their hardware (see: most phones, game consoles, kitchen appliances, "smart assistants"), it's very difficult to be competitive just making hardware.
Given that the Oculus Quest is effectively a flagship phone with a strap attached to it at ~1/10 the sales volume of a flagship phone (rough figures: [0] [1]), it would be very difficult to even pay engineering expenses without a secondary income stream enabled by a) real-identity advertisement targeting/data sucking and b) ecosystem lock-in.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Galaxy-S20-series-sales-number... [1] https://arinsider.co/2020/05/25/data-dive-has-oculus-sold-80...