The outlook is getting more complicated for Meta’s virtual reality dreams
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/27/the-outlook-is-getting-more-complicated-for-metas-virtual-reality-dreams/
For an industry that rarely has major news anymore, this was an awfully big week for virtual reality. Unsurprisingly, all of the important data points are related to the industry’s sole benefactor these days, Meta, which managed to raise the cost of entry to its VR ecosystem, find itself in a new battle with the US government over VR, and announce that it had, again, burnt an awful lot of money on its Reality Lab efforts this quarter.
The strangest bit of news was definitely the seemingly unprecedented move for Meta to jack up the prices of the Quest 2 by $100. This is, again, a one-year-old headset that Meta has purportedly been selling at a loss in order to coax more consumers into the market. This hefty increase takes the entry price from $299 to $399 and signals that the company’s willingness to subsidize headsets into relevancy has its limits.