Meta just officially cut Quest 2’s price to $200 for the 128GB model, the only model remaining.
It comes just one month after the 256GB model went out of stock across the Meta Store and retailers, and it remains unavailable.
When bought from Walmart, the headset also comes with $50 Quest Store credit, effectively valuing it at $150 if you plan to buy standalone games.
Quest 2 originally launched over three years ago at $300 for 64GB storage or $400 for 256GB. The base model saw a storage bump to 128GB in 2021.
Even though it launched Quest 3 in October Meta did not retire Quest 2. Instead, Quest 2 continues to be sold as a lower-cost alternative, and its price was soon after cut to $250, where it stayed until now.
Is A Cheaper Quest 3 Inbound?
Meta’s continued cuts to Quest 2’s price, alongside the disappearance of the 256GB model, strongly suggest the headset is nearing the end of its time on the market.
As it stands, if Quest 2 was off the market the entry price for Meta’s VR platform would become $500, the 128GB model of Quest 3. But there’s strong evidence that Meta plans to introduce a cheaper headset to directly replace Quest 2, a headset rumored to be called “Quest 3 Lite” or “Quest 3S”.
A Meta hardware roadmap meeting leaked to The Verge in March last year revealed the company planned to release a new headset after Quest 3 in 2024 “at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market”.
Reports from The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and a Chinese analyst who has been reliable in the past suggest this headset will feature the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset from Quest 3 but use the old fresnel lenses from Quest 2 to hit a low enough price to replace it. That’s why we no longer recommend buying Quest 2.
XR2 Gen 2 has a more than twice as powerful GPU, which some developers are already using to deliver much better graphics.
It seems likely that Quest 2’s price cuts are in fact clearance sales, and have already successfully cleared stock of the 256GB model. But how long will it take for the 128GB stock to deplete too, and will the cheaper alternative to Quest 3 soon follow?
