It’s heat wave season again, which means Meta is throwing out some pretty sweet deals on some of the best Quest games out there.
From now until July 5th, you’ll be able to grab some of our favorite VR titles in Meta’s Peak Summer Sale, including hits like The Climb 2, Synth Riders, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad, Arizona Sunshine II, Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City, Clone Drone in the Hyperdome, and a heck of a lot more.
You’ll find links and prices for all of those and more below, alongside a list of games you might want to check out too. As always, you can find the whole stack of discounted Quest titles over on the Peak Summer Sale page.
Apple’s top executive in charge of Vision Pro and smart glasses is reportedly leaving the company to join OpenAI.
According to a Bloomberg report, longtime Apple hardware exec Paul Meade is leaving Apple for OpenAI’s hardware team, which according to people with knowledge of his departure will include work on OpenAI’s upcoming AI-powered devices.
In Meade’s 15-year tenure, he oversaw iPad, program management for the iPhone, and then eventually Vision Pro via its Vision Products Group, which he joined in 2017 and later took over as hardware engineering lead in 2019.
While the product group is principally responsible for the launch of Vision Pro, Bloomberg maintains Meade was also behind the development of Apple’s rumored audio-only smart glasses, which would be similar in function to Ray-Ban Meta and Google’s upcoming fleet of Android XR-running smart glasses, slated to release this year from partners Samsung, Warby Parker, Gentle Monster, and Gucci parent company Kering.
Meta Glasses | Courtesy Meta
Additionally, Meade reportedly led development on other AI-related wearables, which includes the company’s ongoing AR glasses efforts—expected to materialize sometime before 2030.
Fletcher Rothkopf, Meade’s deputy in charge of product design function for Vision Pro and its smart glasses, is reportedly taking over Meade’s responsibilities in the meantime.
Bloomberg maintains Meade will work alongside former Apple colleagues and luminary designers Jony Ive, Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, who respectively left Apple over the years to eventually found AI hardware startup ‘io’, which OpenAI acquired last year for $6.5 billion.
This follows the departure of Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is set to be replaced by John Ternus, a long-time Apple veteran and Senior Vice President for Hardware Engineering. Ternus was also heavily involved in the launch of Vision Pro in addition to a slew of core Apple products.
Notably, prior to joining Apple in 2001, Ternus actually worked at Virtual Research Systems, a now-defunct VR hardware company making some of the first commercially available VR headsets.
Bloomberg characterizes Ternus’ ascension to CEO a controversial move within Apple’s hardware engineering unit, which has led to a shakeup that has reportedly sidelined a number of executives.
Apple has reportedly also deemphasized Vision Pro is recent months, cancelling a cheaper and lighter XR headset—previously expected for release in 2027—in favor of developing smart and AR glasses.
Alta announced it’s sunsetting multiplayer RPG A Township Tale (2021) next month, making for a second bit of bad news this year since the studio pulled the plug on its follow-up game, Reave.
Alta co-founder and CTO Joel van de Vorstenbosch announced the news on the game’s Discord, noting the studio explored multiple avenues of keeping the game alive, which ultimately failed.
Now, the game is scheduled to go dark on July 20th, which also includes pulling it from the Quest Store and shutting down the game’s PC VR installer.
Here’s van de Vorstenbosch’s full statement:
Hi @everyone, It’s with a heavy heart that I’m announcing the closure of A Township Tale and its live services. The game will become unavailable to download, and its backend services will be taken down, on the 20th of July.
Like many others, we’ve been impacted by the state of the VR industry in ways we didn’t foresee. As many of you know, we discontinued our second game, REAVE, at the start of May.
We have explored various avenues to keep A Township Tale live, but unfortunately none are realistic in our situation. A Township Tale began in 2016, launched in pre-alpha in 2018, and launched on Quest in 2021. Across that journey, we had the privilege of building what we believe became one of the most special experiences in VR, with one of the best communities in VR. I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has been part of that.
To our players: thank you for playing, for your feedback, and for the fun times. To everyone who spent time in Discord: I’ve personally sent around 120k messages here, mostly from back when I was working on ATT, and it was a genuine pleasure spending that time with you all. To our moderators, server owners, and community leaders: thank you for helping maintain, organize, and support this community over the years. To our supporters: thank you for your ongoing support. I can confidently say A Township Tale would not have made it this long without you.
And to everyone who worked on ATT over the years: thank you for helping build something truly special. Unlike REAVE, A Township Tale’s community platforms will not be closing. Discord, Reddit, the wiki, and other community spaces will remain live, though they may shift further toward being community-managed if they have not already.
Our hope is to preserve some of the history around A Township Tale, and to ensure the community can maintain contact with each other. We know many friendships and relationships have been built here over the years. I encourage everyone to take advantage of the coming weeks to jump back into ATT and enjoy some final adventures.
I also encourage people to share other games they’re interested in, including in #other-games, so that the fun can continue elsewhere after the 20th of July.
A Township Tale is what you might call an MMO-like, as it offers up an open-world environment with a wide variety of roles so users can survive, craft, and build up an abandoned settlement together. It only supports up to 8 players on Quest and 40 on PC VR, however it was one of those games that easily tricked you into thinking it was much larger.
Initially launched in early access on PC VR headsets in 2018, the successful launch on Quest in 2021 allowed Alta to attract over $12 million in investment, which at the time was used to expand the studio and accelerate development of A Township Tale.
Then, in 2024, the studio announced it was working on ‘Project 2’, later revealed to be extraction-style multiplayer dungeon crawler Reave.
Although the studio progressed to the point of hosting months of open playtesting, Reave was ultimately cancelled in May 2026, with the studio citing “increasingly difficult market conditions.”
The Sydney, Australia-based studio hasn’t announced layoffs, and the size of the studio is not certain at this time. Following its $12 million funding raise in 2022, the studio said it was “more than two-dozen and growing,” having scaled up from its original three-person founding team.
Combat Waffle Studios, developer behind VR extraction shooter Ghosts of Tabor (2024), announced the studio is laying off a number of staff in effort to “align the company with the current state of the VR industry.”
Initially released in early access in 2023, Ghosts of Tabor generated over $30 million in revenue with the sale of over 10 million units leading up to release on PSVR 2 in 2025, making it one of VR’s big success stories.
In a LinkedIn post, Combat Waffle Studios CEO Scott Albright announced the studio is making staffing cuts as a direct result of current turmoil in the VR gaming industry.
Here’s Albright’s full statement below:
Today we made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team.
As part of this, we are saying goodbye to a number of talented individuals who have contributed meaningfully to our work. We are grateful for their efforts and are committed to supporting them as they transition to new opportunities. Any studio would be fortunate to have them.
We came to this decision after having a project we were working on with a large platform partner get cancelled
These actions are part of a broader effort to align the company with the current state of the VR industry and ensure we are positioned for long term sustainability.
Our focus remains unchanged. Ghosts of Tabor continues to be our core product, and we will continue expanding that universe alongside our partners.
We remain confident in the future of VR and our role within it.
It’s uncertain how many the cuts have affected, or how many remain. In July 2025, Albright noted in a SQR Magazine interview that the studio’s staff totaled 50 employees, which was notably before the Nokomis, Florida-based studio moved from a 7,000 square foot space to a 23,349 square foot building. At the time, Albright said the move could accommodate “an extra 100 people.”
In 2025 alone, Combat Waffle also released Day Z-style multiplayer zombie shooter Silent North and multiplayer survival game Grim, neither of which have yet lived up to the meteoric success of Ghosts of Tabor.
This follows a growing list of studio shutdowns, layoffs, and project cancellations, the most significant of which was Meta’s rash of VR studios cancellations and broad pullback from funding VR games.
Other notable shutdowns include social VR platform Rec Room, VR veteran and Alien: Rogue Incursion studio Survios, and Metro: Awakening satellite studio Vertigo Studios Amsterdam.
Kluge Interactive today announced the launch of the Linkin Park Music Pack for Synth Riders, making it the VR rhythm game’s biggest paid DLC music pack to date.
The Linkin Park Music pack includes 13 of the band’s most iconic tracks which span the group’s entire career, from their breakout album Hybrid Theory (2000) to their most recent releases.
Check out the track list below:
In the End
Numb
Faint
One Step Closer
The Emptiness Machine (Radio Edit)
Bleed It Out (Radio Edit)
Breaking the Habit
Battle Symphony
Papercut
Castle of Glass
Heavy Is The Crown
Up From The Bottom
Over Each Other
“Linkin Park defined a generation of music fans, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring their music into Synth Riders,” said Kluge Interactive’s Sahin San. “Whether you grew up on Hybrid Theory or discovered them through their latest album, this pack is going to hit hard.”
Fun fact: the latest music pack is actually the game’s largest following the release of the Lady Gaga Music Pack in December 2025, which brought 11 of Lady Gaga’s most popular tracks to orb-smacking, note surfing game. Notably, since Synth Rider’s early access release in 2018 (full 1.0 release in 2019), DLC packs have typically hovered around 5-7 songs.
In the meantime, The Linkin Park Music Pack is available for purchase individually or as a full bundle, which you can grab starting today for Meta Quest, PSVR 2, and SteamVR headsets.
Apple is hiking the price of essentially all of its devices, which includes the already very pricy Vision Pro standalone mixed reality headset.
The News
As reported by 9to5Mac, a host of Apple devices have just gotten significant price increases. The company previously confirmed this would be the case in response to the ongoing RAM and storage crisis, although it wasn’t certain when, or by how much.
Now, the full updated list of Apple device prices is here, which has revealed that Apple has effectively bumped the latest M5 version of Vision Pro to $3,700.
Apple Vision Pro (M5) | courtesy Apple
Released in October 2025 for $3,500, the M5 Vision Pro is essentially a hardware refresh of the original launched in 2024, which included the company’s M2 chipset and the same $3,500 price tag.
Other devices to see similar price hikes include MacBook, iPad, iPad Air, Apple TV, HomePod, and even MacBook Neo, which the company launched for $600 in March, now bringing it $700. You can check out the full updated list over on 9to5Mac.
Speaking to Reuters, Apple reveals it held out for as long as possible before giving into price hikes:
“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly,” Apple said in a statement. “We have shielded our customers from these increases so far, but we have now reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products, including today’s increases for iPad and Mac.”
My Take
To the company’s credit, Apple isn’t the first to raises prices. In April, Meta announced it was hiking the price of Quest 3S and Quest 3, raising the price of them by $50 and $100 respectively.
Then, in May, Valve announced it was hiking the price of Steam Deck, which was sandwiched with the news that its was delaying both the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, and rethinking its release and pricing strategy. To boot, Steam Machine is now available for pre-order for the princely sum of $1,050, which doesn’t particularly bode well for Steam Frame, its first standalone VR headset, which still doesn’t have a price or release date.
And although Apple isn’t the first to raises prices due to the current component crisis, it certainly won’t be the last. Any other holdouts in the market are likely soon to follow, if only because mighty Apple has justified it.
Apple isn’t actually the biggest drivers of these cost increases though, which are primarily due to the surging demand for AI data centers.
As it is, South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix, and US company Micron Technology produce 93 percent of the world’s RAM. And although Apple has historically leveraged its power to outbid other companies to secure components at cheaper prices, it’s the big players in AI right now—Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Anthropic—that are hoovering up the lion’s share of the RAM and NAND.
I’m actively resisting the urge to call Apple a victim in all of this, because there is no greater victim than the end consumer, although it is odd to see the world’s third most-valuable company essentially shrug as its market cohorts blow up the AI bubble yet further—all while sporting a little over 4 trillion dollar market cap in the process.
Now, for Amazon’s June 23-26th Prime Day sale, you can actually get Quest 3S for the same or better than its previous MRSP depending on what you pick, which includes both 128GB and 256Gb storage options and various game bundles:
Additionally, all of the choices above come with three free months of Horizon+, Quest’s subscription game service that lets you download and play a load of VR’s greatest games for as long as you’re a member.
As for the decidedly less cheap and cheerful Quest 3, Meta is still sitting on its regular pricing, although you can save $50 when buying a refurbished unit direct from Meta.
Notably, Meta’s permanent price increase in April brought Quest 3 (512GB) from $500 to $600, while Quest 3S now regularly starts at $350 (128GB) and $450 (256GB).
At the time, the company chalked up the increase due to increased costs of RAM, which have inflated by a wide margin starting late last year—an issue fans of Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame will likely encounter when the company finally releases pricing information for its first standalone VR headset, which will very likely follow Steam Machine’s eye-blistering $1,050 lead.
