Effective March 5, VR headset customers in the United States and Canada will be able to buy Meta’s Quest Pro and Quest 2 at highly subsidized rates. The Meta Quest Pro VR headset will drop from $1,499 to retail for $999 while the Meta Quest 2 256GB model will drop from $499 to $429. There’s a discount of $500 on the Quest Pro and a discount of $70 on the Quest 2.
Although buyers in the US and Canada will begin to buy at the newer prices as of March 5, other potential buyers around the world will begin to buy at the new prices as of March 15. According to Meta, the objective is to draw in more customers through product affordability.
“Our goal has always been to create hardware that’s affordable for as many people as possible to take advantage of all that VR has to offer,” the company said.
Reality Labs is Meta’s division responsible for developing the company’s metaverse technologies. Meta said Reality Labs posted a loss of $13.7 billion in 2022 and revenue of $727 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. For the entire 2022, the firm generated $2.16 billion – in sharp contrast to the $2.27 billion posted for the entire 2021.
Since its launch in October 2022, the Quest Pro had been out of the reach of most consumers due to its high price. And to worsen the situation, there did not appear to be a clear professional use case for the product also. So the best thing to do to lure customers and get investors to earn on their investments is by dropping product prices.
Quest Pro has outward-facing cameras that capture a 3D live stream of the user’s environment and even enable virtual paintings on real walls, among other functionalities. It is evaluated to be very good for creative professionals such as designers and architects among others. VR headsets have even begun to be used outside the gaming community, and this might ramp up sales for manufacturers.