The Quest 3 ships today! But reports show that demand isn’t as high as expected. Why?

Well! Would you look at that? Not only is Summer basically done with now, but Fall is here and it brought the Meta Quest 3 with it. This one is a heavyweight candidate for the list of the best VR headsets on the market, and for good reason!

Meta unveiled the Quest 3 awhile back, but the release happened only recently in September, where October 10 was confirmed as the actual important date: the one that the headset actually starts shipping on!

That being said, with pre-orders having been open for awhile now, and renowned supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo — who’s been tracking VR for a long time now — has adjusted his sales forecast for the Quest 3. But in the not-so-good direction.



So, for analyst-related reasons beyond me, the initial sales forecast for the Quest 3 was over 7 million units. Now that the headset has started shipping, that number has been cut down to 2.5 million units at most, with 1 million of those being expected to happen in 2024 alone.

Huh. Well, while 2024 will be an interesting year for the Quest 3 for sure, as fans will have a tons of great games and tons of new features to look forward to — like actual spatial AR capabilities — but still, expectations dropping by 6 million units seems kind of nuts.

Kuo expects Meta to sell a total of 3,5 million Quest headsets — including models of the Quest 3 — by the end of 2024. And while that may sound like a lot, it’s actually 50% lower than last year. Ouch!

Some say that this is due to the Meta Quest 3’s price increase, which some people view as $200, but in all actuality it is less. It would be $200 if we compared launch prices of the Quest 2 and Quest 3 alone, but let’s not forget that the base model of the Quest 2 came with less storage, so the comparison wouldn’t really be fair. When you compare two 128GB models of the headset, the difference is $100 and not $200.

So, yeah: price increases are a bummer. But it’s sort of a sub-theme of 2023. The iPhone 15 line had a slight increase, the Pixel 8 line from Google had a $100 release too, so this is probably related to market and inflation, rather than anything… You know, Meta-esque.

But if you spin the situation, you can get this: the Meta Quest 3 is more powerful than the Quest Pro and costs $1,000 less. Oh, and Kuo’s predictions — for the time being and regardless of track record — are, after all, just predictions.

So if you’d like to prove him wrong…

… you can check out the Quest 3’s features here and consider getting one: