Facebook's VR Headset Not Selling, Literally Giving It Away

Victor Tangermann
·2 min read

Give It Up

Last fall, Meta-formerly-Facebook unveiled its Meta Quest Pro, a long-rumored, higher-end follow-up to the company's best-selling Quest 2 VR headset.

The sleek device, which initially went on sale for an eye-watering $1,500, has really struggled to catch on since then, just as we predicted at the time.

And now, as Mixed Reality News reports, Meta is literally resorting to giving them away for free: Attendees of this year's developer conference for the global gaming platform Roblox each got a free Meta Quest Pro. While it's unclear how many people attended the event, it's a clear indication that the device isn't exactly flying off the shelves.

Losing Bet

Meta told suppliers earlier this year that it wouldn't order new components for the device, indicating that production would end as the company ran out of parts.

To remedy the situation, Meta even tried to massively cut the price of the device to $999 back in March.

Then there's the upcoming Quest 3, set to be announced next month, which could also be dampening interest in the premium device.

Meta's Reality Labs is still spending billions of dollars developing the tech each quarter, and revenues are only a tiny fraction of that. Yet over the last three years, quarterly performance has only gotten worse.

Long story short, the company is clearly struggling to get traction for its metaverse ambitions, even by the damp standards of the VR industry. Only earlier this month did the device appear in SteamVR's hardware stats, a roundup of the kind of devices people use on Valve's popular VR content platform. According to Mixed, the Quest Pro's usage was a measly 0.39 percent.

For now, all eyes are on Apple. The tech giant has historically bided its time before entering a new market, and the same goes for its recent unveiling of an even more expensive premium headset called the Vision Pro.

But whether the tech giant's $3,499 VR goggles will fare any better than the Quest Pro remains to be seen.

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