Meta is slashing the price of its flagship VR headset, the Quest Pro, down from $1,499.99, to $999.99 in the US and Canada starting this Sunday, March 5th. In the remaining countries where it is available, the premium VR headset price drop will occur on March 15.
Meta will also drop the price of the 256GB version of the Quest 2 headset from $499.99 to $429.99. The price cut for the cheapest headset will take effect on March 5 in all markets. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the new pricing will help “get more people into VR.” In the company’s roadmap leaked by The Verge earlier this week, Meta reportedly plans to release a next-gen Quest 3 later this year that will be “twice as thin, at least twice as powerful, and cost a little more than the $400 Quest 2.” Speaking at an internal presentation earlier this week, Meta’s VP of VR Mark Rabkin acknowledged that engagement with Quest 2 Meta wasn’t at the level the company would like it to be. “Right now, we’re in the third year of Quest 2,” Rabkin told employees.
And unfortunately, the younger groups that are coming in, the people who bought it last Christmas, are not as excited” or as committed as “those who bought it earlier.”
While Mark Zuckerberg made a huge bet that the Metaverse would be the next big step in technology, the company’s shift toward that uncertain future has become quite costly. Meta’s Reality Labs division is huge amounts of money every quarter and lost a total of $13.72 billion in 2022.
Meta managed to become an early leader in the VR market thanks to its acquisition of Oculus in 2014. However, Apple is expected to enter the fray later this year with its first mixed reality headset that will allow users to switch between augmented and virtual reality.
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