“Meta is slicing costs for 2 of its digital actuality headsets because it continues making an attempt to spice up adoption for the nascent expertise on which it has guess its future,” experiences CNN:
The corporate introduced Friday that it’s slashing the worth of its higher-end Meta Quest Professional headset by some $500, bringing its price to $999, roughly six months after it was launched. Meta can also be decreasing the worth of its Quest 2 headset from $499.99 to $429.99. The value minimize for the Quest 2 will go into impact in additional than a dozen nations together with the US on Sunday. The Quest Professional worth drop will take impact the identical day in the US and Canada and on March 15 in all different nations the place it’s bought.
“Our purpose has all the time been to create {hardware} that is inexpensive for as many individuals as attainable to reap the benefits of all that VR has to supply,” the corporate stated in a weblog submit.
Yahoo Finance believes Meta is decreasing costs “as a result of shoppers are, nicely, simply not shopping for as many as the corporate anticipated.” The Verge agrees that the Meta Quest Professional was “an absolute boondoggle of a tool” — however means that’s not the entire story.
“in the event you have a look at the Quest 2, which most individuals use for enjoying video games, as a sport console, it is completed moderately nicely.”
Mark Rabkin, Meta’s vp for VR, advised employees that Meta has bought over 20 million Quest headsets up to now. That features each the Quest and Quest 2…. That looks like a small quantity, however the Nintendo GameCube solely bought 21 million consoles in its total lifespan, and the Xbox Sequence X and S are estimated to have bought roughly 20 million consoles up to now. So in the event you have a look at the Quest 2, which most individuals use for enjoying video games, as a sport console, it is completed moderately nicely.
Their conclusion? “Meta may need large ambitions for VR headsets and their place within the metaverse, however the actuality is that the highest software program on the Quest 2 are all video games…. And whereas Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto customers, it is sort of ignoring that core gamer viewers.”
