OPINION: I love the Meta Quest 2. It’s my favorite VR headset to date because it’s one of the few options that hits the sweet spot between accessibility and performance.
But when I gave it a 5-star rating in 2020, it wasn’t because this VR headset offered the very best specs, design, or library of games, because none of that is true. The main reason I rate the Quest 2 so highly is because of its fantastic price of $299.99 / £299.
At that price, it’s slightly cheaper than a Nintendo Switch OLED, and significantly cheaper than a PS5 and Xbox Series X. Having such an affordable price point is especially important for a VR headset, as most people don’t have much experience with it. virtual reality , and so it becomes a riskier purchase. We all know what we get with a game console, but with VR you can be prone to motion sickness or just not enjoy the increased level of immersion.
In July, PCGamesN reported that the Meta Quest 2 is the most successful virtual reality product to date, surpassing even the Xbox Series X. That’s incredibly impressive, considering previous VR headsets were considered niche products and struggled to appeal to the mass market.
However, Meta recently made the controversial decision to price the Quest 2 at $100, with costs rising to $400/£400 for the 128GB version and up to $500/£500 for the 256GB model.
This now means that the latter configuration is priced similarly to the PS5 and Xbox Series X, while the base 128GB configuration is significantly more expensive than a Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series S.
That would be fine if Meta Quest’s game library was of the same caliber as the Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox consoles, but that’s just not the case. Beat Saber, Resident Evil 4, and Superhot VR are all great fun on the Quest 2, but they’re not nearly as prestigious or enjoyable as Breath of the Wild, God of War, or Forza Horizon 5.
So why did Meta make the controversial decision to raise the price? On Meta’s own blog, it said the price hike “will help us invest for the long term and advance the VR industry with the best hardware, action-packed games and groundbreaking research on the path to truly next-gen devices.”
That’s kind of vague and still doesn’t really explain why Meta decided to do this two years after launch. One possible explanation is that Meta recently saw its first year-over-year revenue decline in the company’s history.
With Facebook and Instagram seeing a drop in ad sales, seemingly due to the rising popularity of the likes of Tik Tok, Meta could try to make up for the financial loss by maximizing revenue from its VR market.
Meta also recently made a U-turn in its decision to force Quest users to create a Facebook account due to fan reaction. The higher number of active Facebook accounts means that Meta gets a bigger slice of the pie for ad revenue, allowing Meta to subsidize the cost of the VR headset. But now that the link to Facebook will soon be broken, Meta may have decided it needs to make up for the loss of advertising money in another way.
Whatever Meta’s reasoning, it could well be a costly mistake for the company to increase the cost of the Quest headset. You could argue that a price jump for a 2-year headset isn’t too much of a problem, as most people who want a Quest 2 have probably already bought one.
But it’s what the price hike means for future Meta headsets that worries me. Meta plans to launch a new high-end headset called Project Cambria later this year. If the Quest 2’s cheapest configuration is now $400/£400, that means a high-end headset will likely cost somewhere between $500 and $600.
It would be difficult for Meta to sell large quantities of VR headsets when they are priced that high. It would also mean that future Meta headsets could be priced similarly to the Vive Cosmos range, resulting in far more competition than what the Quest 2 faced.
Meta will also face fierce competition from Sony, which is gearing up to launch the PSVR 2. PlayStation has already confirmed that the PSVR 2 will have a new Horizon game as its launch title. If PlayStation continues to push more popular first-party games on its VR headset, it could become a more attractive option than future Meta headsets, despite the requirement to plug into a PS5.
At the very least, Meta has teased exciting new tech for future headsets like improvements to hand-tracking and Air Link, but I doubt they’ll justify losing the Quest 2’s greatest asset: its affordable price.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete is our weekly computer-centric opinion column where we delve deeper into the world of computers, laptops, components, peripherals and more. Find it every Saturday afternoon on Trusted Reviews.
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