While Meta is starting to focus on AR glasses, it's clearly decided to give its current VR headsets a serious push. From tomorrow, March 5, the Meta Quest Pro will drop from $1,499 to $999. As UK pricing is currently dollar-to-pound, that means it'll likely drop to £999 in the UK.
There's also a price drop on the most expensive Meta Quest 2, although it's not so dramatic: it's down to $429 from $499.
The news was announced by Meta's Mark Zuckerberg on Instagram. While the price cut on the Quest 2 looks like a pretty typical attempt to shift unsold stock in anticipation of the Meta Quest 3 (and perhaps an admission that raising prices in August was a mistake, although the cheapest version's price is unchanged), the price cut on the Pro is more significant.
This massive price cut suggests the headset just isn't selling
I genuinely can't think of another high-profile, high-end product getting such a huge price cut so early in its life. The Meta Quest Pro was only announced back in October, so taking a third off the price already doesn't suggest promotion; it suggests panic.
We know that Meta's multiverse division is bleeding money with Mark Zuckerberg betting the company's future on AR and VR. So assuming the Meta Quest Pro wasn't originally priced with huge profitability in mind, this looks awfully like an attempt to reboot the device and get it, and Meta's software such as Horizon Worlds, onto more people's heads.
Will it work? A drop from $1,499 to $999 makes it a lot more tempting, but as ever with VR the real issue here is the content: all the hardware in the world doesn't matter if there's no content you want to experience on it. For many reviewers, the price wasn't the main problem with the Pro: it was that it didn't feel significantly more compelling than the much cheaper Quest 2. It might take more than a price cut to fix that.
