As said in their most recent Facebook blog post, Oculus is ending the sales (after the initial stock runs out) and development of its budget-friendly Go Headset and putting more focus towards its Quest headset and the software that comes with it. They claim that this is due to the high approval and the amount of positive feedback that they received with the release of the Quest and the Rift headsets. As they continue Oculus says, “You’ve told us loud and clear that 6DoF feels like the future of VR. That’s why we’re going all-in, and we won’t be shipping any more 3DoF VR products,”.
The original company will continue to overlook Oculus Go through 2022, but will also accept new apps through December of 2020. As the stock for the Go Headset is starting to deplete, they reported having already started working on a new and less strict Quest app distribution channel. They have also already started working on another alternative option that is set for release sometime in 2021, and will “allow users to share their apps to anyone with a Quest as long as they meet Oculus’s content standards.” The plan with these features is to reportedly allow users to not manually sideload apps into their software, hopefully making it easier to install things that are in testing or made for a limited audience.
With all of this, the Go Headset has already been unavailable for most of 2020 and showing up as out of stock on the official website since early January. As described in their post, the Oculus store will stop accepting apps and updates after December 4th, 2020, and will stop adding apps to the store altogether after December 18th, 2020. This seems to be due to both the amount of attention focused on the Quest and the shortage of software with the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many people to take safety measures by social distancing. As of now, however, the Oculus Quest has been restocked on the online store.