Data from Amazon US suggests that Quest headsets didn’t sell as well over Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2024 as compared to 2023.

Based on data from Amazon US, in 2023 about 170,000 Quest headsets had sold in the 30 day window surrounding Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2024, that number was around 146,000 Quest headsets, representing a drop in sales volume of 14%. This may not be representative of other retailers.

That’s a surprising outcome considering Meta just launched its new-and-improved Quest 3S, made a significant price cut to Quest 3, and had a flagship game with recognizable IP (Batman: Arkham Shadow) ready in time for Black Friday.

During the 2023 holiday shopping season, Meta was still selling its aging Quest 2 headset. That year’s Black Friday deal on the most popular version of the headset (128GB) was just $250 with a $50 gift card, making the headset essentially just $200.

That proved to be more popular at the time then this year’s deal in which Meta was pushing the Quest 3S (128GB) model for $300 with a $75 gift card, representing essentially a $225 purchase.

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That’s not a huge difference in cost, and from a value standpoint, the Quest 3S is far and away worth the $25 difference. However, price isn’t the only factor; broader economic factors and deals on competing products (not to mention changes in interest in VR overall) are all significant additional variables.

When it comes to the sales ratio between Quest 3S and Quest 3 during this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the headsets have sold around 3:1, similar to the ratio between Quest 2 and Quest 3 in 2023.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • dextrovix

    Even as a regular VR user myself, I don't want to have the headset on my head for long periods, and I don't see VR ever growing more into widespread use because it's still impractical and bulky, even my Quest 3.

    Maybe this year with the economies of the world taking a downturn people who are casually interested in VR aren't prepared to spend their cash on VR.

    Perhaps sales are mainly from people who are upgrading, only I don't think any one "killer app" (e.g. Batman in this case) is going to make VR suddenly appeal to the masses now we're over a decade into VR availability, to suddenly shift headsets at substantial volumes.

    • kool

      Idk the quest must be uncomfortable I've only used the psvr extensively and it never gave me any comfort issues. I've even fallen asleep with it on a few times. I think the halo design is the way to go if you're gonna use VR. Bobolink makes one for quest!

      • dextrovix

        Sure, and I’d consider myself having very strong VR legs so no motion sickness or anything like that, and comfort of fit isn’t really my issue, I just don’t want reality blanked out for hours on end, even in MR and so prefer to not have long stints with a headset, no matter if it does offer a halo. Fair enough that you feel to the contrary. My point really was I’d use it more if it wasn’t a process to flick between reality and non-reality, and when in VR it wasn’t so impractical. It’s almost an impossible ask, and that’s what I meant about wider spread adoption. Beaming the images into my mind is what is more likely to offer wider adoption by the public passed what we have right now- people won’t need monitors at all then, and finally we have both worlds without anything attached to our heads. Obviously technologically impossible right now, but that’s the step needed, and Meta has probably spent enough already, but the entity that does will be very dominant. Good luck Elon? Dunno.

        • kool

          I get you now, but I like the cut off from reality. it's almost like a reverse sensory deprivation therapy for me!

          • dextrovix

            Good for you, and I can understand the draw you find for that too. And I still love VR for the immersion absolutely. But I’m typing this on a monitor in reality, because you’d get a response an hour later in VR to achieve the same thing because it’s still clunky as hell for real interaction.

    • wheeler

      That a decent $200 HMD with what is now a decent variety of "AAA" games (and plenty of other compelling third party games) to back it up isn't selling may indicate that the low end VR market is just tapped out. There are large scale VR surveys that show 1/3 of kids in the USA actually already have VR headsets. So the "but what if we make it even cheaper!" trick may not work anymore.

      As for the Quest 3, it's entirely unsurprising that some enthusiasts are upgrading. Survivorship bias and all of that (I'm also one of them, personally using a BSB)

      Either way, it's not like anything has addressed the fundamental problem that people keep putting up their headsets, where they proceed to just collect dust. And this is apparently irrespective of minimized friction, minimized cost, high accessibility, good content availability, and so on. This has been the fundamental problem with VR for a decade now.

  • Ivan

    To get a better understanding, how many Quest 3 devices were sold in the Black Friday/Cyber Monday period in 2023?

    It would be interesting to see if there was a change in how many Quest 3 devices were sold in this period in both years now that it has been a year since its release.

    • Ben Lang

      Quest 3 Black Friday on Amazon US:

      2023 (50K) → 2024 (47.3K)

  • Michael Speth

    PSVR2 is on sale for $350 USD including Horizon. Quest 3 is $150 more or you spend $50 less and get a Quest 3S both with Batman.

    If you look at Horizon vs Batman, Horizon's graphics wins hands down. So perhaps people are choosing PSVR2 instead of Quest products.

    • BadHostile

      Horizon Call of the Mountain is a boring climbing simulator with crap gameplay, don't even try to compare it to the brilliant Batman Arkham Shadow, lol :D

    • VR5

      While I don't think Horizon had much to do with it (it's great but not as good as Batman), PSVR2 did sport the higher price drop so while Quest is selling well all year round, for BF it was the time to buy a PSVR2. Quest mostly holding steady despite no outstanding reductions is not really a bad sign, I'd be worried if it sold badly outside of BF though.

  • vr games feel like work they not fun. only a small group of people find standing in the middle of a room waving their hands around fun. u would think we would have learnt from the wii, the move, and kinect. stop trying to make people move around to enjoy a video game.

    • gothicvillas

      It's about being inside the game

      • Alex Soler

        Yeah but although a bit exagerated, he has a point. Standing in the middle of a room whithout moving your legs is the worst imaginable possition for me. It gives me horrible memories about attending mass when I was a kid and there where no seats left in the church. I'd rather go for a walk or sit. But there are not really good solutions for walking inside a game while sitting.

        • kool

          I like playing VR seated with joysticks for movement. I don't think I could play a game were I had stand and duck for the same reason you have.

        • gothicvillas

          I play my VR games with feet up and beer next to me. Sometimes there are fun games standing and can get a decent sweat out of me but most of time we play seated. "Standing still in the middle of room and waving arms" sounds like coming from someone who dont really know VR

    • Ben Lang

      Nobody is making anyone use a VR headset. There's lot of people who do in fact like standing in the middle of a room waving their hands around for fun… in fact VR's most successful independently developed game (Gorilla Tag) is exactly that.

    • eadVrim

      Keep moving dolls with a remote control inside a 2D flat screen like kids.

  • Dragon Marble

    Casual consumers during the holiday season are much more sensitive to price difference than quality difference. Hopefully Q3S's relative strength over Q2 will manifest later in the form of higher retention and sustained sales.

  • ShaneMcGrath

    Replace Quest 3 with anything, Let's face it most people don't have as much disposable income to throw around at ANYTHING, Let alone luxury items.

  • Bram

    The main dutch reseller for quest headsets shows that after 1.5 month of it's release, only 8 people reviewed the quest3s vs 296 reviews for the quest3! That also shows the 3s really isn't selling well compared to it's better equipped more expensive older brother. It's only 2.7 percent of q3 selling figures since it's launched last year. And there also seem to be no reason this will change for the better now black friday is already behind us. What will this mean for Meta's future strategy is the big question. Meta already stated that the regular quest3 was selling better than expected and the retention rate is higher with the better q3 headset than the cheaper quest 2. So will Meta abandon the budget version of the quest and push more for higher end headsets in the range of 500 to 1000 dollar?

    • wheeler

      I don't think it's that simple unfortunately. The Quest 3 is much more expensive and so there is a survivorship/enthusiast bias when it comes to both units sold and retention. I.e. purchases are more likely to be from people that have VR legs, that have the time and energy for VR at the end of the day, that are willing to deal with VR friction/hassle, and so on.

      I don't think Meta's goal with starting their own hardware platform was to appeal to a small community of enthusiasts in single digit millions (talking about retained users, not units sold) that might buy a Quest 3 and hopefully stick around. I think they want hundreds of millions and, in the long term, billions of users. So rather than (another) attempt at high end VR, this kind of result might lead to more of a directional pivot–either within VR itself (non-gaming applications) or just to AR more generally (Ray-Bans have been quite successful)

  • Nevets

    Comfort, comfort, comfort. Out of the box. Until this becomes a priority, people either won't use it, or they'll use it for short periods and feel physical relief when they remove the clamp from their head. (And make no mistake there are many strides possible here, even with current hardware).

  • eadVrim

    Q3s is alomost the Q2, Q3s will not change people's idea of the previous virtual reality headsets. But Q3 yes, and unfortunately Meta leaves it in the shade and directed to only enthusiasts.

  • Stan

    I'd be interested to see the Last 30 days for Dec 3 2023 (9 days past Black Friday, including the next weekend) vs Dec 8 2024 (9 days past Black Friday, including the next weekend).

    This seems like it would be more accurate of a comparison. I'd expect the bulk of sales to be done Black Friday weekend, so the numbers may not change much (and the extra weekend may not matter for online sales), but generally for retail, comparing in-holiday season days matters more than calendar days

  • Hussain X

    Last year Black Friday time a better chip Quest 3 had just released. Then people were able to buy this better chip headset for a year before a cheaper but the same better chip headset released. This also meant that since last year and for a year including this year's Black Friday, new Quest headsets had an excellent competitor in the market for even cheaper than the Quest 3S 128GB.

    That competitive headset was nothing other than used Quest 2 headsets. Not sure about other markets but in UK they're selling at good prices in second hand market. E.g. I sold my Quest 2 256GB last week with no accessories just what came in the box for £200 on eBay. I've seen them sell for higher too. Didn't make sense to me. Even used 128GB Quest 2s were going for £170 to £190. For a bit more money they could've got a brand new Quest 3S with all that it brings. But for some reason used Quest 2s are selling well. Money must be really tight that they'd rather go to used market to save a bit more. I kept my Quest 2 for an extra year as a backup whilst owning a Quest 3. But seeing the prices for used Quest 2s, I decided to sell mine last week. I still have my Rift S for back up. This meant that person probably didn't buy a new Quest headset, but for Quest platform it maybe at least got a new player into its ecosystem, so Quest platform and VR still wins.

    Quest 2 is still is a very capable headset and can play most of the content out there. Batman isn't going to disappear and can be played in future, and they have other great content to play for now that will run on Quest 2 fine. For every nee Quest 3 bought, a good proportion of used Quest 2s are being sold too.

    Another thing was in UK the Quest 3S 128GB has appeared to be sold out on Amazon UK for at least a good week around Black Friday. And no idea if Amazon UK offererd vouchers like in US. Maybe it did that's why it was sold out here. So maybe it was sold out in US too hence adding to lower sales?

    Plus the recent Deckard rumours (controllers), that could also be standalone, maybe has maybe made some hold off buying a new Quest to wait and see. Plus third party Meta Horizon OS headsets got announced too. Maybe some are waiting news on that before committing to a new Quest headset. So, these are some reasons why new Quest headsets haven't sold as well as last year. Not necessarily people have lost interest in VR (and hopefully not MR since Quest 3 is what you want then).

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    For most people currently looking for a VR headset, Quest 2 and 3S have the same amount of storage, the same display with the same resolution and the same lenses, play the same games that in the most cases look the same, but Quest 3S costs 20% more than Quest 2 did last year.

    Sure, the SoC is improved, MR is usable and there are gift cards. But the most popular casual games don't need the extra power, MR is a non-essential comfort feature, and the average Quest user spends very little money on apps anyway. For non-enthusiasts, the entry fee has effectively been raised by USD 50. And from Quest 2 selling over four holiday seasons at different price points for USD 299, 399 and 249 we know that purchase price had a huge impact on sales numbers, much more than factors like ergonomics or the number of AAA titles.