Meta Horizon Plus subscription: How it works, and is it worth paying?

What you need to know

• The Meta Horizon Plus (or Horizon+) subscription offers free games to Meta Quest users.
• You get two Quest VR games per month, which you keep in your library as long as you stay subscribed.
• You also get access to around 25 other titles all the time, which are switched out every few months.
• The Meta Quest+ subscription costs $7.99 per month or $59.99 per year, though you pay $1 the first month.

With a Meta Horizon Plus subscription, Meta Quest gamers get access to two curated games per month, plus a rotating catalog of around two dozen games, similar to other gaming subscriptions like PlayStation Plus or Xbox GamePass.

Meta Horizon+ costs $8 per month, or you can bring that down to $5 per month by paying $60 annually. Users must be 17 or older to pay for it, but one Horizon+ subscription can be shared across multiple users on a single Meta Quest headset via app sharing. That includes teenage accounts or children's accounts.

To access the Horizon+ library, find the Horizon+ icon in the Store app on your headset. You can also find a Horizon+ icon in the latest update of the mobile Quest app, in the Menu tab. In either case, you can subscribe or download your latest monthly games there.

As with other subscription services, games you play with Meta Horizon+ are only accessible with an active subscription. Cancel your subscription, and you'll lose access to those games unless you buy them outright or resubscribe.

Each month, Horizon+ lets you add two curated games to your library, which means you'll always have access to them so long as you've got an active subscription. Access to the rest of the rotating catalog of games is only available as long as that game is part of the Meta Horizon+ service. Once Meta removes these games from the service, the only way you can play them is by buying them outright.

At any given point in time, you'll have access to two dozen games in the rotating library, plus any games that you've added to your Horizon+ library. A nice little hack to save some money is to subscribe to Horizon+ one month, cancel the next month if you already own both games being offered, and then resubscribe a month later with no penalty.

Meta's TOS specifies that this is a legitimate option. So if you pay monthly, you'll want to keep an eye on the Meta Horizon+ page at the end of the month to make sure you want next month's games.

Introducing Meta Quest+ | VR Title Subscription - YouTube

Watch On

The service started strong with Pistol Whip and Pixel Ripped 1995. Pistol Whip is a fantastic John Wick-like rhythmic shooter where you move down a corridor of armed foes, shooting to the beat of EDM music while dodging their bullets. Pixel Ripped 1995 is the third game in a popular retro arcade series where your character alternates between playing Atari-style classics and diving into pixellated 3D worlds.

The next month, Meta added Mothergunship: Forge, a fantastic mecha roguelite that our reviewer called "impossible to put down," and Walkabout Mini Golf, one of our favorite sports games on the Quest.

Walkabout has added a series of epic DLC courses based on the movie Labyrinth, Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the classic adventure game Myst, and more. Since you'll be getting the game for about $4 instead of its usual $15, you can spend that saved money on some DLC courses if you want.

In other words, the Meta Horizon+ subscription is well worth your money, giving you many of the best Meta Quest games at a discount.

Analysis: Meta Quest+ gets a tentative thumbs up

Aside from the fact that we genuinely like all four of Meta Quest Plus' initial games, the subscription itself is a genuine bargain. They cost $85 collectively at full price, already more than the price of an annual Quest+ subscription; even if you pay monthly, you're saving $71 total.

Not every month is going to have something you love, but you can easily unsubscribe in the app any month, and we appreciate that Meta isn't making you pay extra for a "family subscription" to share the service with other accounts.

To be fair, Meta Horizon+ isn't a complete triumph. We likened it to Xbox Games with Gold, whereas we would have loved an Xbox Game Pass equivalent instead — one that gave you access to Oculus Studios games like Supernatural or Beat Saber, for instance. But maybe Meta was worried that it didn't have enough content to support something like that.

We do hope that, in addition to offering two games per month, Meta Horizon+ will also offer some kind of discount on other games in the Quest Store. That isn't mentioned anywhere in the announcement page or TOS, but perhaps it's something Meta can offer down the line.

Generally speaking, we're excited for Meta to use this to highlight fun new titles like Pixel Ripped 1995 that gamers might otherwise have missed or skipped. Plus, considering how rarely some VR games tend to go on sale, Meta Horizon+ looks like an especially good bargain.

We also like how Zuckerberg's announcement emphasized that this service works on both Quest 2 and Quest 3. It's a good reminder that the games you get now will carry over to the new headset.