Pico 4 will continue to come with three free VR games for another seven weeks.
The offer of the headset coming with Green Hell VR, Warplanes: Battles over Pacific, and the upcoming blockbuster Arizona Sunshine 2 – together worth around €100/£80 – was originally announced last week as a Black Friday weekend deal. But Pico is now extending it until the end of January 14.
The Black Friday weekend deal also had a discount on the price of the headset. A few retailers still show this discount, but most show the regular price.
Pico 4 Review: Should You Actually Buy One Instead Of Quest 2?
Pico 4 ships today, and we’ve had a chance to put it through its paces over the past few weeks. Pico is no newcomer to VR – it revealed its first headset in 2016. Last year it was acquired by ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant behind TikTok. Pico has always
Pico 4 has specifications, and is usually priced, at a midpoint between Meta’s Quest 2 and Quest 3. It had dual 2K displays and pancake lenses a year before Quest 3, but uses the same original Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chipset as Quest 2 (with a less than half as powerful GPU as Quest 3) and lacks scene-aware mixed reality.
Pico 4 isn’t sold in North America reportedly due to regulatory scrutiny of TikTok, which Pico’s parent company ByteDance owns.
While ByteDance has funded developers to port over a large percentage of the major Quest Store content, it’s missing Meta’s standalone exclusives like Beat Saber, Resident Evil 4, Population: ONE, and Onward. And given recent events, there are significant concerns about the future of the Pico platform.
Earlier this month ByteDance laid off a significant portion of Pico’s staff, telling UploadVR it “decided to restructure the PICO business to focus more on hardware and core technologies”. It also cancelled its own Beat Saber competitor and handed off its only announced major exclusive game, Just Dance VR, to a “new partner”.
While ByteDance told UploadVR Pico will “continue to operate normally and provide its users with top-notch services”, it declined to give us more specific reassurances about Pico’s future plans.
ByteDance: Pico Will Have ‘Top-Notch Services’ After Layoffs
We put big questions to TikTok-owner ByteDance about the future of its Pico headset business. They replied, but we don’t have clear answers.
Whether you should jump on this offer from Pico depends on your personal desire for the three specific games, how much you want pancake lenses, and how willing you are to gamble on ByteDance’s uncertain commitment to VR.
You should also be aware that Meta seems to be planning to release a ‘Quest 3 Lite’ sometime next year, which could offer the new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset in a headset priced similarly to Quest 2 and Pico 4. If it’s successful, developers could put less focus on making their games look good and run well on XR2 Gen 1 headsets like Pico 4.
