Oldest kid wants one of these & I know very little about them.

Other than cost of entry [purchase], and I assume games are buy to play [plus in game purchases?], anything in particular to know?

Is the Quest 3 worth the upcharge over the Quest 3S?
Alternatives from different brands?

My last gaming experience is the Wii & PS3, and my kids have 2 Switches that I've dabbled with a bit, so I'm pretty out of touch on this stuff, anymore.

They are pretty neat, I have a quest 2. Set up a burner facebook account unless you are into facebook and want to be hooked up to it. Its fun to just kill some time with.

I've only used the quest 3 with professional software so I cant give good feedback as its totally different software. You could also buy a headset and hook it to a computer but I just use my quest2 for that and have the option to use it standalone as well.

My teen has one, he plays on it daily. Has a buncha games, he’s constantly on beat saver, which is funny watching him move around. He’s got some fighting games too.
His is the higher grade one.

I have a Quest 2. I bought it as the 3 was being released and the price had dropped.
They are a cool toy. I tried my son's quest and was intrigued enough to get one. You can now create an account without facebook. There are some free games but most content is not. It has a web browser so you can surf SIGforum on it but it is more work then it is worth.

Interesting note. When my DIL and 2 grandkids were living with us last year they wanted to use my quest 2, all the time.
We set boundaries and I let them use it as I hadn’t been ussing it much lately. After a few weeks they didn’t want to use it as often and a month later they rarely ever used it. I mentioned this to my son when he came home from deployment and he told me that he saw the same pattern at home. He thinks it has to do with how immersive it is, that after the novelty wears off, it’s actually mentally hard work to use it. I haven’t used mine in at least 2-3 months.

She got the Quest 3S
We'll see how it goes

I have a quest 1 (first gen) and it is kinda fun in small doses. There are some solid shooting type games that are fun for “us folk” as well as a bunch of other fun things like VR google earth / YouTube etc.

It’s really quite amazing how these things can trick your mind. It’s also kinda fun grabbing an incoming missile in your mech and throwing it back while shooting with the other arm.

Do I think these things are the end all be all etc. hell no. But based on my first gen, they can be quite fun in small doses.