Facebook has permanently cut the price of its Oculus Go VR headset. “Oculus Go is now priced at $149, which is equal to a $50 price drop,” the company tells UploadVR. “We are applying comparable discounts across all countries where Go is sold. Updated pricing is rolling out to all channels.”
The Oculus Go is manufactured by Xiaomi and marked Facebook’s effort to produce a low-cost, entry-level headset that could handle 360-degree video and other basic VR content without relying on a phone. With a Snapdragon 821 processor and no real head or hand tracking, it offered a roughly comparable experience to phone-based solutions like Samsung’s Gear VR and Google’s Daydream.
Phone-based VR is kind of a dead end, though — both of those competing platforms are essentially finished, and while the Oculus Go has a reasonable content library, it’s hard to recommend it in 2020 unless your needs are very simple. (This isn’t going to work with Half-Life: Alyx, for example.) The all-in-one Oculus Quest is far more advanced and, with its new PC compatibility, looks to be where Facebook will be focusing most of its effort from now on.