Given how vastly tech prices differ in South Africa compared to other countries, we generally don’t comment on price fluctuations unless they relate to South Africa.

This week however, we need to buck that trend because Meta has done something questionable. On Tuesday, Meta announced that the Meta Quest 2 will have its price increased. This is a virtual reality headset that was released in 2020.

“VR’s momentum is undeniable” Meta claimed before stating that in spite of this momentum, the cost to make and ship its product has been on the rise.

According to Ars Technica the price increase will see the base Meta Quest 2’s price increase from $299 to $399. The Meta Quest 2 with 256GB of storage will increase from $399 to $499. That’s not all though. Meta added that the price of accessories and refurbished units will increase as well.

Aside from manufacturing and shipping costs, Meta doesn’t give much justification for the price increase. There are no new features to speak of. Oh wait, you can get a free copy of Beat Saber, provided you purchase a headset between 1st August and 31st December 2022 and claim the game within 14 days of activating your headset. We suppose a game released in 2018 worth $29.99 is something.

Something Ars Technica points out is that the release from Meta lacks any sort of talk about the future of VR hardware. There is much talk about software development but aside from that, there’s just a rehashing of features that already exist.

It seems as if positioning itself as “the most affordable VR headset with a comparable feature set on the market” wasn’t the best idea after all.

This isn’t good news for Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse though, price increases sure aren’t going to get more people into that space, whatever it actually is.