Meta Still Testing 'Avalanche' VR Cloud Streaming For Quest

Meta’s long-awaited cloud-streaming system for PC VR games, codenamed Avalanche, appears to have surfaced on the French outlet GAMERGEN’s Quest 3 headset during a recent livestream. The discovery was preceded by the revealing of a flag ‘AVALANCHE_CLOUD_GAMING_INFRA_ENABLED’ in the firmware dataminer’s find in April 2022.

The ‘Activate Avalanche (Alpha)’ option showed up in the experimental section of settings, with the description, “Launch an Avalanche session using the cloud gaming endpoint”. The quest offered Lone Echo, a blockbuster Oculus Rift game from 2017 for play, but upon trying, GAMERGEN received an error “Unable to launch the Avalanche session”, with a description “An error occurred while launching the Avalanche session, please check your network and try again”.

The existence of Avalanche was first revealed when dataminer Samulia found the ‘AVALANCHE_CLOUD_GAMING_INFRA_ENABLED’ flag added in v24, which was released in late 2020, suggesting the development has been ongoing for at least four years now. A redditor in a similar situation, a year prior to GAMERGEN, wrote they were able to stream a PC game, Asgard’s Wrath via a UK Wifi5 session for about 15 seconds. However, the experience relies on a stable internet connection for quality results.

Meta’s foray into cloud VR gaming raises potential competition concerns, as there are third-party tools like Virtual Desktop for PC VR streaming already in use. Meta has kept the cloud VR streaming ban on its Quest Store and App Lab, resulting in the shutdown of cloud-based service PlutoSphere, raising questions about anti-competitive practices. There have been reports that the US FTC is investigating Meta’s competitive practices, but the investigation’s current status remains unclear.

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