Meta is Raising Quest 3 and Quest 3S Prices Amid Memory Cost Surge

By
Scott Hayden
-
8

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.”

Image courtesy Redditor Vast_Front259

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.

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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.

Valve Steam Frame | Photo by Road to VR

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.

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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:

Image courtesy Meta

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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.
  • Rudl Za Vedno

    Well F it global economy is going to hell in a handbasket anyway. I'm forced to pay equivalent to $9.50 USD per gallon (2.3€/L) of gas atm and it gets worse each week so there is no wonder Zuck is done with selling cheap VR headsets. It's either pay to play or be gone :(

    Now is a great time for Meta to resurect RIFT PCVR lineups as it doesn't need nor ram nor SSD nor CPU, but they're clearly not interested in PC anyway :(

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      TL;DR: these days everything has a CPU, RAM and flash to process camera data, even the Touch Pro controllers.

      The reasons for increases in RAM and flash vs gasoline are vastly different, and both will have negligible impact on how Zuckerberg spends money on XR, given that Meta's USD60B+ net income in 2025 came to 98% from ad revenue largely uncoupled from current shortages. They'll feel the hurt mostly in their new AI data centers. With USD 100B invested in XR, now increasing the price for Quest is more about their "we sell HMDs at cost" policy, not something that would impact their revenue in any noticeable way. Based on that, going PCVR for cost reductions wouldn't be on the agenda.

      And while the Rift CV1 was "dumb", basically an HDMI display with speakers and an IMU for 3DoF tracking connected directly to the PC via USB, pretty much every new PCVR HMD except maybe the Bigscreen Beyond is actually "smart", with onboard SoCs also requiring RAM and flash storage.

      CV1 got away without because the absolute room tracking of HMD and controllers was done with external Constellation IR cameras connected directly to the PC. It had a tiny SoC for reading the IMU sensor data and sending it via USB, (which might also have connected to the Touch controllers via bluetooth), but didn't do any serious onboard processing.

      Everything using inside-out tracking now relies on local compute to at least do image pre-processing, and for example the PSVR2 can do the whole room and controller tracking on device, and also includes a simple GPU that can take a flat HDMI signal and properly project it inside VR as an undistorted rectangle all by itself. It most likely also does pupil tracking, leaving only the more compute heavy parts of ETFR to the much faster PS5 APU. Similalry the Pimax Crystal uses a Qualcomm XR2 Gen 1, the same SoC as Quest 2, even during thethered use for eye tracking. The XR2 also contains a GPU that could perform reprojection to compensate for lag from wireless transfer by itself, though I don't know if it does.

      While they'd need less RAM and flash than for a standalone HMD, Meta couldn't escape the currently elevated component costs even by switching back to PCVR in 2026. At least not if they'd want to release something modern with lots of sensors and eye tracking instead of a decade old 2016 state-of-the-art.

      And targeting VR users that don't already own a matching PC would of course ruin the whole plan due to the much more expensive large amounts of RAM a newly bought machine would now require for both PC and GPU, making a standalone with much more moderate, shared RAM requirements the way more economic option.

      • XRC

        There is a Tobii supplied "eye chip" on the main board of both PSVR2 and original Crystal which handles eye tracking+data sent to Tobii software installed on client (PS5 and PC respectively)

        Both have the more basic "gaming" licence enabling automatic ipd, vertical position indicator, dynamic foveated rendering

        you can jailbreak the Crystal using broken eye by ghostiam which provides full data access (ocumen) including camera streams

        regarding "dumb" PCVR hmd's you can add the Shiftall MeganeX and Pimax Dream Air to the list. Just reviewed Dream Air lighthouse for a friendly ghost

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Mainstream users aren't interested in a headset tethered to their PC using a wire. And a lot of mainstream users don't have a beefy PC which lets them run games in much better quality as the standalones these days.

      also the increase in gasoline/oil is thanx to the US. It sure is here in europe as the US was the one who pushed for sanctions on Russian oil and natural gas (so they could sell theirs at a much higher price), and also started the war with Iran and now even, like the pirates they are, blocking our access to the oil from the middle east.

  • Naruto Uzumaki

    "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 "

    "Meta is Raising Quest 3 and Quest 3S Prices Amid Memory Cost Surge"
    They bout have 8Gb ram can t beat that logic

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      TL;DR: Flash prices have also risen, but the USD 50/100 increases will be strategic numbers, not just component cost calculations.

      These price changes will be a mix of component costs and price policy. While RAM has seen the largest price hikes of up to 400%, flash storage also went up to double of what it was in 2025, so the 512GB in Quest 3 actually add more costs. Obviously the now increased prices don't reflect the actual changes in production costs, instead spread them over all models.

      The LPDDR5 used in Quest 3 hasn't risen as much as DDR5 RAM because isn't used in AI servers, and flash was dirt cheap before when bought in large quantities. The production cost difference between a Quest 2 with 128GB and 256GB was only about USD 15, so even if prices had doubled from that for someone like Meta with longterm contracts, the current increase for the 512GB Quest 3 would only be USD 60. And the 256GB Quest 3S would now be USD 30 more expensive to produce than the 128GB version, slightly lowering Meta's margin from selling it for USD 100 more.

      The USD 50 increase for the base 128GB Quest 3S may be artificially low, because Meta saw sales crash when the Quest 2 price rose by USD 100 21 months after introduction. Given that the 256GB model sells for USD 100 more for (initially) about USD 15 in extra costs, they probably wouldn't have had to raise the price at all to now not sell below production costs, but raised it by the same USD 50 to stick to their three price tiers. The USD 100 more for Quest 3 is targeting the enthusiasts that were already willing to pay significantly more for mostly improved optics. And with Quest 3S outselling Quest 3 by about 4:1, falling numbers in Quest 3 unit sales due to the 20% price increase won't hurt total Quest user numbers as much as the more price sensitive market segment stopping to buy base models would.

      Given that we may see a new Meta Phoenix HMD (getting announced) in late 2026, no longer subsidized/sold at costs like Quest 3/3S have been so far, the USD 600 price tag for Quest 3 may now even serve to cushion the blow from the much higher expected price for Phoenix. So while the reason for the new prices will be real increases in RAM, flash and other component costs, the actual price tags are more determined by product strategy and marketing psychology.

  • NL_VR

    I wonder what the price of the Steam Frame will be.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      I'd rather wonder if they will even be able to release it in the first half of 2026, we're already about a month into the second quarter and still no peep. At earliest I think they will talk about a release date by the end of june, so not actually releasing it yet, but I hope for others I am wrong and they will release it in june, but I think many will be screaming about the much higher than expected price.