Meta – the company formerly known as Facebook – is hiking up the price of the Meta Quest 2 headset by $100 next week on 1st August.
The 128GB Meta Quest 2 will now cost $399.99 USD, and the 256GB model will be $499.99, though every headset will now include a copy of the popular game Beat Saber for a limited time. Meta is also increasing the price of accessories and refurbished units.
With the massive bets that Mark Zuckerberg’s tech company is placing on building the metaverse, Meta states this “will help us continue to invest for the long term and keep driving the VR industry forward with best-in-class hardware, action-packed games, and cutting-edge research on the path to truly next-gen devices.”
However, this is an exceptionally rare move within the tech industry. The Meta Quest 2 launched as the Oculus Quest 2 in October 2020, the entry price for the 64GB model being set at just $299, before getting a bump up to 128GB in the middle of last year. That initial pricing was notable for coming in at $100 less than the original Oculus Quest, indicated the company’s intent to put the VR platform into as many homes as possible. It’s highly likely that they have been selling the Quest 2 at a loss or with very thin profit margins, similar to what is commonly seen in the home console market.
Meta state that, while “VR’s momentum is undeniable” and tout over $1 billion of spending on apps and games for their platform, “the costs to make and ship our products have been on the rise. By adjusting the price of Quest 2, we can continue to grow our investment in groundbreaking research and new product development that pushes the VR industry to new heights.”
To put it another way, even the metaverse will have inflation…
This move will reset the aggressive pricing that the headset has held for the past two years, then. Even so, the Meta Quest 2 will still be the best priced standalone VR headset on the market – PlayStation VR requires a PlayStation console to power it, while Vive, Steam Index and others require a high-powered PC, and other standalone headsets have struggled to match Meta’s position.
The one slight silver lining is that this does give prospective buyers (who are happy to put their faith in Meta, now that the Facebook requirement has been lifted) the opportunity to grab the headset or place an order before the price increases.
Source: Oculus
