The Meta Quest 2 gets a permanent price cut to $199

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.

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.