Meta Cuts VR Headset Prices by up to $500 After ‘Underwhelming’ Sales
- Meta is cutting the price of its VR headsets, which are a big part of its metaverse ambitions.
- The high-end Meta Quest Pro will be reduced from $1,500 to $1,000.
- The headset has had mixed reviews and suffered “underwhelming sales,” The Verge reported.
Meta is slashing the price of its Quest 2 and Quest Pro virtual-reality headsets in a bid to boost sales, it announced on Friday.
The price of the 256GB Meta Quest 2 will drop from $500 to $430, while the higher-end Meta Quest Pro will get a $500 haircut to $1,000.
“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,” Meta said on its blog.
The price cuts come into effect on Sunday in the US and Canada.
Reviews of Meta’s Quest Pro have ranged from mediocre to mixed. They’ve been matched by “underwhelming sales,” Alex Heath of The Verge reported in his Command Line newsletter on Friday.
Heath also reported that Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, told employees that its planned second generation Quest Pro headset would not be going ahead.
Meta’s Reality Labs, which produced the Quest Pro as part of its mission to develop Mark Zuckerberg’s “metaverse,” lost $13.7 billion last year. The “metaverse”, which the CEO considers to be “future of the internet,” was a central part of Facebook’s decision to rebrand as Meta in 2021.
Zuckerberg has been criticised by both staff and investors for pouring billions into the “metaverse” given its decision to lay off thousands of employees and its earnings misses.
In the company’s most recent earnings call in February, Zuckerberg appeared to address this concern. He told investors that 2023 would be the “year of efficiency” for Meta, including its Reality Labs division.
Meanwhile, in a recent internal presentation, Meta VP Mark Rabkin reportedly told staff to make the metaverse “so obviously successful” that his dad stops calling “every week” to ask about it.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider made outside normal working hours.
