Why does the Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition exist?

The Immersive Wire - 30 June 2025

Author

Tom Ffiske
June 30, 2025

Executive summary

Welcome to your weekly briefing on the metaverse and spatial computing. Here are your snippets to sound smarter in meetings this week:

  • Top Story: Why does the Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition exist? (analysis below).

  • Other stories: St John Ambulance has launched Seconds to Save, a VR tool developed with Visualise to teach London youth life-saving first aid and highlight the consequences of knife crime through immersive scenarios (more below).

This is the UK right now. 

Tom Ffiske, Editor of the Immersive Wire

Top story

  • The new headset, made in collaboration with Microsoft, is an Xbox-branded piece of hardware that comes with a controller.

  • I suspect it is mutually beneficial. Microsoft aims to promote its Cloud Gaming concept, and the collaboration leverages the gaming market. Meanwhile, Meta continues to dip into gaming for its consumers, so it’s a win-win deal to focus more on a hardcore gaming audience. The biggest clue for this is that it comes with three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.

Other stories

  • Niantic will sunset its Maps SDK for Unity following the spinout of its game division to Scopely, ending support in July 2025 and deactivating the SDK by October 2025.

  • Q-Games has unveiled the first gameplay footage of Dreams of Another for PlayStation VR2, a third-person exploration game by Baiyon that uses shooting to create rather than destroy.

  • Rob Yescombe has acquired the rights to his VR murder mystery game The Invisible Hours and is seeking partners for a remaster and screen adaptation.

  • SkillsVR has joined Meta’s Horizon Managed Services as an official XR MDM partner, expanding enterprise training capabilities through integrated device management and progress tracking on Meta Quest headsets.

  • Spatial has released Analogue 2, a collaborative design platform built for Apple Vision Pro that enables teams to create and iterate on 3D projects in real time without coding.

  • St John Ambulance has launched Seconds to Save, a VR tool developed with Visualise to teach London youth life-saving first aid and highlight the consequences of knife crime through immersive scenarios.

Note: The Immersive Wire is run by Tom Ffiske, who also works at Accenture. The contents of the newsletter should not be regarded as Accenture’s views.

All spelling mistakes are deliberate, actually.