Meta has officially discontinued Quest Pro, the company’s first mixed reality headset.

Meta announced back in September that it was winding down Quest 2 and Quest Pro sales. At the time, the company said remaining stock would be sold through the end of the year or until they ran out, whichever came first.

Now, in place of the Quest Pro order page, Meta is suggesting users to buy Quest 3 “for the ultimate mixed reality experience and premium comfort.” You can still buy Quest Pro’s ‘Touch Pro’ controllers however, as they support Quest 2 and above.

Released in 2022 at the eye-water price of $1,500, Meta hoped to use the headset to kickstart its mixed reality ambitions among consumers, as it was the first to offer color-passthrough, pancake lenses, and both face and eye-tracking—coming in strong contrast to the company’s other offering at the time, Quest 2.

Quest 2 (left) & Quest Pro (right) | Photo by Road to VR

Nearly a year after launch, it was apparent the Pro-level headset wasn’t appealing to users nearly to the degree Meta had initially hoped, prompting the company to knock Quest Pro down to $1,000. To complicate matters, high initial pricing of Quest Pro put a strain on developers, which resulted in very few compelling MR experiences out of the gate.

It was clear what was needed was a more accessible headset. In October 2023, Meta released Quest 3, which housed much of the tech seen in Quest Pro—minus face and eye-tracking, and at the starting price of $499.

SEE ALSO
Sony to Discontinue Free PSVR Camera Adapter for PlayStation 5 This Month

Clamping down yet further on price-performance, Meta released Quest 3S a year later, which houses the same Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset as Quest 3, although including the same cost-saving Fresnel lenses and displays as Quest 2—marking the company’s most energetic push to capitalize on its mixed reality ambitions.

While Meta’s strategy to capture the console price-point with Quest has been a winning strategy thus far, what’s uncertain is whether the company will head back into the ‘Pro’ pricing structure anytime soon. The Information reported earlier last year that Meta was cancelling a potential Quest Pro follow-up, however Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth partically refuted those claims, noting that “there might be a Quest Pro 2, there might not be. I’m not really telling you, but I will say don’t believe everything you read about what’s been stopped or started.”

Newsletter graphic

This article may contain affiliate links. If you click an affiliate link and buy a product we may receive a small commission which helps support the publication. More information.

Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Dragon Marble

    To complicate matters, high initial pricing of Quest Pro put a strain on developers, which resulted in very few compelling MR experiences out of the gate.

    Of course. I don't understand why XR companies continue to learn the lesson the hard way. With Quest Pro, you could say that the device was not good enough. But now the Vision Pro, as good a device as you can get with today's tech, faces the same problem. PSVR2 almost died prematurely because of the same thing.

    "Make it desirable before it is affordable" has always been a stupid strategy. Meta's bottom-up approach is the only way. The reason is simple. Hardware need software to be "desirable" in the first place. And software development has adopted the business model of selling cheap copies to a large number of users.

    That means hardware designers don't really have a choice. The first question they need to ask is can we sell tens of millions of units.

    • VrSLuT

      They stopped drinking the the Apple Kool Aid and escaped Apple's reality distortion field but now are really Jonesing that they didn't get some of that sexy eye-tracking!

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      (Consumer) technology that was successful with a rather high price at the beginning, only affordable for a minority, but then used the money from that initial small, but lucrative market to improve tech and lower cost through both larger numbers and production cost reductions: PCs, laptops, telefones, mobile phones, smartphones, CD players, washing maschines, LED lighting, cars, power drills, tape recorder, VHS recorder, refrigerators, Walkman, laser printers, harddisks, SSD, beamer, microwave ovens…

      (Consumer) technology that became successful by pumping billions into it for more than a decade to push it into households without even making back a fraction of the investment:…

      And no, gaming consoles were sold with at least some profit for most of their existence, Nintendo never sold at a loss and Sony stopped doing so after the extremely expensive to produce PS3.

      I believe in XR, because I think that it is genuinely useful and will make people's lives better. But that is also the key to its mass adaption: it first has to become useful/usable (for some, then slowly) for the masses, like all the successful technologies listed above. Claiming that one billionaire's incredible expensive long term bet for more market control and money, enabled by his 60% of Meta's voting shares, would be the only viable approach, is completely ignoring how technology got established so far, blatently ignores the very limited active user numbers the highly subsidized USD 300 Quest collected for those billions, and replaces economic reasoning with wishful thinking.

      Palmer Luckey wrote a famous blog entry in 2018 titled "Free isn't cheap enough" about VR acceptance by most users. And it wasn't an opinion piece, but based on Oculus research that most people wouldn't use a VR HMD even if they got everything for free. With Quest we saw a ~40% retention rate, so 60% won't use a VR HMD they already paid for.

      Price is not the primary issue. USD 1500 would have been completely fine for a business oriented Quest Pro, if it had proven to be (sufficiently) useful for its official target audience. It just utterly failed to do so.

      • Alexisms

        All the items you mention to prove your point have one thing the Pro never had, enough consumers that wanted the product. That plus the price destroyed it. Only compounded by those low sales not encouraging devs to risk anything on making a killer app.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Many of the products I listed could have only dreamt of the est. 50-100K unit sales during their first year that the Quest Pro generated. And there is a decent chance that Meta sold much more Quest Pro than Bigscreen sold Beyond or HTC sold Vive Focus 3. And that's fine, because these serve a niche audience with matching price calculations. But apparently not good enough for Meta.

          The Quest Pro's problem was that the concept was to create a professional HMD, but the only large enough use case they found was VR conferencing. And while the hardware was okay for that, the software wasn't anywhere near ready to make it actually useful. So almost nobody bought it for business use, and Meta tried to instead also sell it to gamers, where it offered very bad value. Had they clearly stated that gamers should wait for Quest 3, and also given the Pro the time and support that HTC gives their Pro HMDs, it might have found its niche, and established Quest for professional use, where service and reliability outweigh specs and price.

          But instead Meta dumped it once it didn't immediately deliver success/large numbers, like they did with several Go/Quest business programs before. Sometimes tech simply needs time to establish itself and then grow and mature from an initialy small use case snd user base, and trying to force it to grow faster will just fail.

      • Dragon Marble

        None of your examples are applicable. It is the symbiotic relationship between software and hardware that makes gaming consoles different from any "consumer electronics".

        The value of phones, PCs and laptops were clear even in the early days when there were just a few apps. On the other hand, the most common question you hear about the Vison Pro is "what do I do with it".

        A gaming console — in order to realize its entertainment value — needs a constant supply of games that are very expensive to develop but only have limited value for an individual. "Crowd funding" is the only viable business strategy.

        I am not saying you have to sell the consoles at a loss. Just do whatever you can to get them into as many hands as possible.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Whenever I post whole lists of counter examples to show that your "we must force it into the market now" theories are not how technology is actually established, all I get is that none of them are applicable for unspecified reasons, because VR is somehow special, so known economic rules can't be applied.

          Also always ignoring that PCs and mobile phones started in the 70s, laptop in the 80s, with initially miniscule use cases and user numbers. Most people saw no practical use in buying one at all for literally decades. And people absolutely have an idea what to do with AVP, and be it only for watching movies. Just not at that weight and that price.

          How about you come up with examples where any company sucessfully established a technology that most customers at that time/state simply didn't care about, by just ruthlessly burning money for a decade? XR will succeed once it offers enough use for enough people, and until then it will do fine as a niche technology.

          • Dragon Marble

            The example is right in front of your eyes. It's called Quest 3S. It's sold more than PS5 and Xbox combined this holiday season. The kickstart process has completed. The Quest platform is now on a self-sustainable path. The reason Meta hasn't stopped pouring money is because it has bigger prizes in its sight.

          • flynnstigator

            I don’t know if the path is self-sustainable, though. No one’s arguing that the Quest is the dominant VR platform. Given how much money Meta has put into it, it would be weird if it weren’t. But it’s not clear to me that Meta’s place in the market is so solid that they can’t be dethroned if they turn off the money hose.

            I have a large library of games on their store thanks to a referral system that I and others frankly abused for hundreds of dollars in free games, but if someone released a better headset and store, it wouldn’t stop me from switching. I might hang onto the Quest until I was bored with those games, but I would still switch. The real driver of sustainable XR adoption in the future is going to be everyday AR, and I’m not convinced that Meta is going to win that battle, or that their $100B investment into the opening act of gaming-focused VR is going to pay off. They’ve been very good at hardware design and aggressive pricing, but their leadership decisions (like the Quest Pro) show a lack of vision, and Meta’s AR efforts are tied to Microsoft, whose software efforts haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory lately.

      • NicoleJsd

        That’s much different than a niche entertainment device. You are talking about a whole technology, computers as we know it. Not fitness goggles

        Computers were used for much much more than beat saber

  • You can still buy Quest Pro’s ‘Touch Pro’ controllers however, as they support Quest 2 and above.

    Thank god. Those were what convinced me as someone coming from PC VR headset with none insight out tracked controllers (Rift CV1 and Valve Index) to even consider a Quest 3.

    Meta, discontinuing those controllers in the future or even with your next headset would be a big mistake.

  • xyzs

    Just release a Quest 3 premium or Quest 4 with oled screen ASAP…

    That’s all what matters

  • Michael Speth

    The price of the Quest Pro is proof that meta cannot sell headsets at the actual cost, $1k should be the price of the Quest 3S while the Quest Pro should be $2k or so.

    Meta can only sell garbage because customers are not willing to pay the actual costs due to the garbage performance and garbage graphics the headset delivers.

    This is why Meta loses BILLIONS per month.

    • Manfred Richter

      they just reported record profit, where do you get your information from?

      • Michael Speth

        If you go to upload VR and see meta-reality-labs-q3-2024-revenue-rebound-continues

        You will find that Meta's VR division has lost about $50 billion since its 2020 creation.

        You do understand the difference between revenue and profit/income?

        • Jedon Thompson

          You realize that all Meta's VR efforts are just to get to AR right? Ray Bans with full phone capability is the end goal, take Samsung, Apple, Google market share in hardware via AR.

          • Michael Speth

            Yes, 100% that Meta wants to enslave its users both capturing everything you see and here and simultaneiously blocking what you see and here depending on their censorship algorithms in the real world.

            They will also debank you as the ultimate weapon against thought crime.

            I am also glad you agree that meta VR has lost $50 billion since its inception of 2020 and is continuing to lose BILLIONS per month in order to sell people garbage hardware.

          • Jedon Thompson

            VR Industry would be pretty much nothing without that Meta cash infusion. Yes of course they want to make money eventually, that is their reason for existence. I too am not in favor of our tech overlords, and yet I still want it. I suppose that you eschew the use of all non ethical VR systems?

          • Michael Speth

            The VR industry is composed mostly of garbageware games that have retarded what VR was since 2020. Meta has done nothing but drag the entire industry down.

            If you look at any full time VR Youtuber, they will admit like Mateo that graphics have become retarded in VR. They just accept the retardation of the industry otherwise they couldn't stay in VR and be saine. VR Content creators for the most part are chearleading garbageware to keep the views and their sanity.

            I would like an ethical approach to Reviewing VR content. Garbage Mobile VR should be labeled separately even if this garbage is ported to steam/psvr2. Unless the ports are outstandig like Star Wars Tailes from the Galaxy's Edge Enhaced Edition on PSVR2, all mobile garbage ware should get a tag.

            When people review discuss mobile ports, they should indidcate that their judgement and scale is based on mobile garbage hardware and is not a comparison against Modern Hardware (Console/PC).

            That would help with transparency. It would also educate people who simply believe Meta Mobile Garbage is what all VR is like. IT IS NOT. We need to break meta mobile garbage hardware's hold on the market.

            The only way is education because Meta is already losing billions per month trying to capture the public.

          • Jedon Thompson

            You seem pretty negative, what are some things you think aren’t garbage?

          • Michael Speth

            There are some very great experiences available for console/pc vr.

            "Gran Turismo 7" (Paid) & "My First Gran Turismo" (Free) are the pinnacle of VR on PS5.

            Of course "Horizon Call of the Mountain" is awesome. The demo is a great entryway to show people what VR is like (the boat ride scene allows people to adjust).

            "Until You Fall" is probably the best VR Melee combat game on the market (avaiable on all platforms). The graphics on PC/PSVR2 are good. I don't believe it is a work out game, it is simply a result of good physics.

            "Star Wars Tails from the Galaxy's Edge" is a really great experience that provides many different VR interactions coupled with adequate progression. I also enjoyed embodying several different unique characters from the SW universe.

            I also enjoyed "Arizona Sunshine 2", that was when the studio was still PC focused. Veritgo Games is now focused on Mobile Garbage hardware and it shows with how terrible metro is when compared to their fairly old Arizona Sunshine 2.

            For awesome graphics and a great puzzle game, Red Matter 2 is it.

          • Jedon Thompson

            I don’t do consoles although I did like Gran Turismo 2 on an emulator in prep for driving my FD3S on Laguna Seca.
            Of course just using the headset as a display etc results in better quality graphics, Meta nor anybody else has 4090 quality on a headset. I guess you are just not a fan of any standalone VR.
            The best melee in Battle Talent in MR mode, it’s really good. Still haven’t found a better fighting sim than Thrill of the Fight despite the terrible graphics.

          • Michael Speth

            Without Dynamic Foveated Rendering (DFR), the nvidia rtx 4090 is simply not good enough. The next rtx5090 won't be good enough either.

            Eye tracking is that important to graphics and Meta has proven they really don't care about eye tracking because their goal isn't making great gaming VR headsets. It is as you pointed out, making garbage hardware they can push onto the masses.

            It is really a big loss for PSVR2 on PC to not have implemented Eye Tracking. I can understand that Sony maybe didn't want to pay Tobii licensing fees on the PC for the eye tracking software – that is my suspecision of why eye tracking is not on PC for PSVR2.

            DFR is what allows GT7 to look so good on the PSVR2. Without eye tracking, the graphics would be much worse.

            Even on garbage hardware like Quest 3, eye tracking COULD allow for higher graphics rendering. But meta doesn't care about that. They care about TEXT and hand tracking. They don't care about VR gaming.

          • Jedon Thompson

            I’ve never had the opportunity to try eye tracking. Hand tracking still isn’t great, it feels awkward to me. I’d rather have full body tracking. I mean, Meta put eye tracking on Quest Pro, seems maybe it cost too much to do it on the Quest 3.

          • Anonymous

            No. He is a known elitist troll and the opposite of Virgin. He will shit on any standalone VR because he couldn't accept that PCVR will never be main stream by itself.

          • Alexisms

            Aw look who's been watching Black Mirror.

          • Michael Speth

            I really enjoyed watching Black Mirror – it is almost as if they are telling us their play book ahead of time.

  • dextrovix

    Michael (incel) Speth: Garbage graphics etc.

    • Davpar

      Yup. Just blocked him. Not worth reading any of his content.

  • Adrian Meredith

    Quest pro should never have been released, the fact that it did shows a poor working culture inside meta