I've watched a lot of product keynotes in my day. I was there, metaphorically speaking, for the Macintosh reveal in 1984, and I've sat through every Apple event since Jobs and turtlenecks became a whole aesthetic. So when I tell you that Meta's presentation of its new VR headset barely mentioned gaming, I want you to understand how strange that is.

VR was built on games. Full stop. People bought the Rift, the Quest, the whole lineage of these things, to swing lightsabers in Beat Saber or play poker with a friend across the country. My granddaughter's friends still haul out the Quest at every birthday party, and I promise you they're not doing productivity workflows. They're playing.

And yet, according to PC World's coverage, gaming got barely a mention during the headset's showcase. Instead we got the usual modern Meta playlist: mixed reality, productivity, virtual workspaces, presumably some AI assistant that wants to help you plan dinner. It's the same pivot we've watched happen in slow motion for years now, but seeing it this naked is still a little jarring.

My take, and I say this as someone who has defended VR to skeptical family members at more than one Thanksgiving: technology should work for you by solving actual problems. If Meta believes virtual monitors and holographic meetings are the problems worth solving, fine, make that case. But don't quietly sideline the very thing that got people to strap a computer to their face in the first place. The games weren't a stepping stone. They were the foundation.

There's a historical echo here I can't shake. When smartphones got powerful, the makers spent years insisting they were serious productivity tools, and the app makers just kept quietly shipping games that made everyone buy the things anyway. The users always vote with their time, and the vote has always been play. Meta may want to be a workplace company, but its headsets live in living rooms and dorm rooms.

Now, to be fair, a keynote isn't a product roadmap. Companies reorganize their talking points around whatever they're trying to convince investors of that quarter, and sometimes the games show up later in quieter announcements. I've been around long enough to know that what's on the slide deck and what's in the store library are two different things.

But if you're a VR gamer who's been waiting on this headset to justify an upgrade? I'd hold off until we see what's actually playable at launch. Let the early adopters do the testing. That's my advice for most first-generation anything, and it hasn't failed me since the days when 1GB of storage seemed like an unimaginable luxury...

I'll keep an eye on this one. If Meta follows up with a proper games showcase, I'll happily eat a little crow. But if the silence continues, that tells you everything about where their priorities landed, no matter what the marketing says.