Just a month ago, I championed the Quest 2 VR headset as a great buy for PC gamers, perhaps even better than the hard-to-find Steam Deck. Meta today announced a price hike for the headset. The entry-level 128GB Quest 2 costs $300 to $400, while the 256GB model goes from $400 to $500. I can only assume that this is because Mark Zuckerberg is tired of selling these cars and wants to sell a lot less.
Okay, that cuts a lot. Here is the actual statement from Meta justifying the price increase:
In a post on the Oculus website, the company says that “the cost of manufacturing and shipping our products is rising.” It also says that by raising prices, it can “continue to increase our investment in ground-breaking research and development of new products that are taking the VR industry to new heights.”
If you’re looking at Quest 2 as a piece of computing hardware, as Meta certainly would, it makes sense. We’re still in the middle of a chip shortage, and Quest 2’s impressive all-in-one hardware doesn’t grow on trees. Facebook’s pockets aren’t as bottomless as they used to be, and there are expenses to create new games and “experiences.”
But if you look at the Quest 2 as a gaming console, as the vast majority of both consumers and retailers do, it’s confusing. Consoles should lead the way in losses as money returns for games and third-party licenses. A 33 percent price increase years after a game product was released is almost unprecedented – that’s the point in a product’s life cycle where you lower prices to move units and get as many people into the ecosystem as possible. New Meta branded headsets are on the way, but this price increase will only make people look elsewhere.
VR as a gaming system is promising, perhaps even revolutionary, assuming the hardware can quickly outgrow some of the pain points early adopters are willing to overlook. Virtual reality as some kind of new frontier for interaction in the digital world, ideally 100 percent monetized by Facebook Meta, seems ridiculous. And creating even higher barriers to building that user base by charging higher entry fees won’t help.
The news is not so bad. If you buy Quest 2 between August 1st and the end of the year, you’ll get a free version of the mega-popular Beat Saber. That’s where the good news ends.