The Meta Quest 2 has been on sale for nearly a month, and today, Meta’s making that price permanent — $199 is the new sticker price for the virtual reality headset, the company announced today. That’s half what it originally cost in 2020, and Meta is permanently cutting the price of Quest 2 accessories like the Elite Strap with Battery (which I highly recommend) in half as well.

The Quest 2 is currently being supplanted by the $500 Quest 3, of course, but it’s still an incredible entry point to VR, one that plays every Quest game except for a single Quest 3-exclusive title announced last month. It doesn’t have color passthrough vision or good mixed reality gaming, and I definitely prefer the Quest 3 for comfort and immersion, but I don’t know if I prefer it by $300.

The Quest 2 is also capable of streaming games from a PC (including VR games) or from the Xbox cloud. I played through all of Half-Life: Alyx that way.

I do have concerns about how long Meta will support the Quest 2 after seeing how much the company dissed the original Quest by retroactively shutting down fan-favorite games and pulling support. Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth told me we should expect first-party games to support Quest 2 for “quite a while” last June but didn’t answer my question about whether Meta might retroactively shut down games on Quest 2.

Still, there are millions more reasons to support Quest 2: it was the most popular headset the company’s ever produced and the lion’s share of the 20 million headsets Meta sold as of February 2023. It was in such high demand during the pandemic that Meta actually raised the price on a then-two-year-old gadget in 2022.

For now, the Quest 2 can even get some updates ahead of the Quest 3, like the lying down mode that arrived in March and took another month to hit Meta’s newer headset.

The Quest 2 still feels like a good deal today.

Source: The Verge The Meta Quest 2 gets a permanent price cut to 9