Meta announced today (April 16) that starting on Saturday April 19 the company would raise prices on its Meta Quest 3 and 3S virtual reality headsets. The tech giant blamed the ongoing RAM crisis for the price hike, per a Reuters report.
Meta's headsets come in three configurations: Quest 3S with 128GB or 256GB storage and the Quest 3 with 512GB of storage. Here's how their prices are changing.
Configuration |
Old Price |
New Price |
|---|---|---|
Meta Quest 3S (128GB) |
$299.99 |
$349.99 |
Meta Quest 3S (256GB) |
$399.99 |
$449.99 |
Meta Quest 3 |
$499.99 |
$599.99 |
The Quest 3S is Meta's entry-level virtual reality headset, while the Quest 3 is the higher-end more fully featured headset. According to Reuters, the price hike will also affect refurbished Quest headsets, but accessories will retain their current price tags.
The slow death of Meta VR
Meta isn't alone in raising prices due to increasingly gargantuan memory prices, but this move feels like another step in the slow death of Meta's virtual reality ambitions.
Since January, Meta has laid off 10% of its employees in the Reality Labs group, responsible for VR, and both cancelled and uncancelled its metaverse Horizon Worlds. The company recently backtracked on killing Horizon Worlds after some intense fan backlash.
In January, it was revealed that Reality Labs lost a staggering $6 billion in the company's fourth quarter while only making $955 million. In total, the division has burned $70 billion since 2021.
Meta is allegedly not abandoning VR according to Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, which flies in the face of the company's recent actions.
In February, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth insisted that Meta Quest isn't dying and that the Meta Quest 4 is in active development. “Furthermore, these internal changes unblock roadmaps for us on hardware; the next two devices we are looking at are very exciting,” Bosworth said at the time.
Presumably, those devices are the Quest 4 and Quest 4S.
