Expand / You can be this cheerful too if you were in Meta Quest 2!
If there’s one rule about PC and gaming hardware, it’s that prices always drop after release. The Meta Quest 2 became the exception that proves the rule this week, as Meta announced an upcoming $100 price hike for the popular standalone VR headset, up to $400.
The increase, which Meta blamed on “rising costs,” suggests the company may be trying to rein in subsidized hardware prices that have contributed to nearly $1 billion in monthly losses for its virtual reality division in the most recent quarter.
But when you look at the short history of consumer home VR headsets, the Meta Quest 2 remains a historically cheap VR entry point, even after the price hike. This is especially true when you factor in the inflation and additional hardware required to power most other comparable headphones on the market.
$400 ain’t what it used to be
Enlarge / Fig. 1: $400 is still a middle-of-the-road nominal price for consumer-oriented VR headsets.
To see how the price of the Quest 2 has changed, we’ve collected historical price data for a variety of popular headsets that offer full “six degrees of freedom” head and hand tracking (which eliminates cheaper options like the Samsung Gear VR and the Oculus Go). We’ve also included the cost of any hand-tracking controllers and external tracking hardware (where applicable), so the launch-era Oculus Rift doesn’t enter the picture until the 200 Oculus Touch controllers launch dollars months later.
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Ignoring the additional cost of the hardware needed to power all those “connected” VR headsets, the $400 Quest 2 is right in the middle of the nominal historical price range for consumer-level VR. While headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive launched in 2016 at prices around $800 (including controllers), those prices dropped quickly into 2017.
In 2018, most headsets were settling in the nominal $300-$500 price range, with high-end exceptions like the HTC Vive Pro and Valve Index serving the “money is no object” part of the market. . And while value-minded consumers might find deals like a $229 Samsung Odyssey Plus in early 2020, $300 to $400 has been the lowest reasonable asking price for most VR headsets of late years.
Expand / Fig. 2: Adjusted for inflation, Meta Quest 2 remains one of the cheapest VR options ever available.
However, when you adjust for inflation, the Quest 2’s $400 price tag ends up looking a lot better, hovering near the lower end of historical headphone prices. That might be surprising, considering we’ve only had five or six years for inflation to wipe out the relative value of previous headphones. But given how inflation has approached double-digit annualized rates in recent months, $400 today looks a lot different than it did even in the late 2010s.