Meta’s Quest 3 VR headsets aren’t the most high-performance on the market, but if there’s one thing they have going for them, it’s the cost-to-quality ratio—a ratio that just got a little bit worse. Meta just announced in an official blog post that prices are rising across its Quest 3 lineup. The hikes are as follows:
- Quest 3S with 128GB of storage increases from $299 to $349
- Quest 3S with 256GB of storage increases from $399 to $449
- Quest 3 with 512GB of storage increases from $499 to $599
I’ll give you one guess what Meta says is the reasoning for its price hike. If you guessed the surge in memory prices, congratulations, you’ve won negative money in your wallet. Per Meta: “The cost of building high-performance VR hardware has risen significantly. The global surge in the price of critical components—specifically memory chips—is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR.” Meta says that price hikes will also affect its refurbished headsets. Meta says that price hikes will also affect its refurbished headsets.
It’s a story we’ve heard over and over again in the world of consumer electronics, especially in laptops, PCs writ large, and game consoles like the PS5—basically any device that uses RAM. The Quest news might come as especially bad news for the VR world. In case you haven’t been keeping up with the state of things in the VR industry, times are tough. Meta axed quite a few major VR gaming studios, platforms like Rec Room are dead, and Meta’s metaverse ambitions are basically no more. Okay, that last one isn’t really a major blow, but it’s still a sign of the times in VR, and the times aren’t what most would categorize as optimistic.
The fact is, this is just another barrier to entry for people getting into VR, which is probably not what developers want to hear right now. The Quest isn’t the only VR headset in the world, but it’s by far the most accessible, and fewer Quest headsets on people’s heads means fewer opportunities for developers to sell their games and, actually, you know, make stuff.
Luckily, there are already a lot of Quest headsets in the world as it is, but I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t another in a long line of bad days for VR.
English (US) ·