spatialcomputing.info

Meta announced it’s hiking prices for both Quest 3 and Quest 3S headsets, which includes both new and refurbished units, as the company cites the global surge in the price of memory as a main factor.

Starting on April 19th, US-based consumers will see both Quest 3S variants (128 GB and 256 GB) bumped up by $50 respectively, while the 512GB variant of Meta’s Quest 3 flagship headset will go up by $100. Here’s the new pricing below:

• Quest 3S (128 GB): $350
• Quest 3S (256 GB): $450
• Quest 3 (512 GB): $600

For clarity, Quest 3 is currently priced at $500 for the 512GB variant, while Quest 3S is priced at $300 for 128GB and $400 for the 256GB versions. You’ll find the new international pricing tiers at the bottom of this article.

“We’re making this change because the cost of building high-performance VR hardware has risen significantly,” Meta says in a blog post. “The global surge in the price of critical components—specifically memory chips—is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR. To keep delivering the quality of hardware, software, and support you expect from the Quest platform, we need to adjust our pricing.”

Meta says it’s also updating pricing for refurbished Quest units, although the company hasn’t said by how much just yet. Meta further said Quest accessories will stay at their current prices, ostensibly because they don’t include either RAM or SSD, which have recently seen massive memory price increases relative to years prior.

This isn’t the first time Meta has hiked prices for Quest. In 2022, the company raised the price of Quest 2 by $100 just months after launch, citing similar pressures around rising production and component costs—before later reversing the increase as market conditions stabilized.

Notably, Valve may have found itself in a similar bind resultant from the memory crisis, as the company announced in February it had to revise both price and release date of its upcoming Steam Frame VR headset—still slated to release in the first half of 2026.

While regrettable on its own, the Quest pricing increase also follows a wider shift at the company’s Reality Labs XR division, which recently saw layoffs affecting 10 percent of staff in addition to the closure of three first-party XR studios which resulted in multiple game cancellations.

Additionally, Meta announced last month it’s decoupling new Horizon Worlds builds from working on its VR headsets, making the social VR platform essentially a mobile-focused platform moving forward.

Virtual woes notwithstanding, Meta says in the blog post it “remains committed to investing in VR and leading the category because we believe this is the future of computing. We have a long-term roadmap full of new hardware and experiences, and this adjustment helps us stay on track to deliver that future.”

The company previously said that, despite the shift, it’s still funding third-party titles in addition to its current plans to release two new VR headsets—a possible successor to Quest 3 as well as a thin and light headset that tethers to a compute puck.

The new international pricing scheme for Quest 3 and Quest 3S follows below: