Comment by stego-tech
4 hours ago
I think the price is very reasonable for what’s on offer (especially given the current memory crisis), and given that Valve doesn’t subsidize the cost of anything, it really shows how much Meta values your privacy and biometric data for advertising purposes (~$600 in subsidies).
One thing I keep seeing reviewers skip over is VR Chat, which is weird since it’s a core VR experience that continues seeing average player count increases YoY compared to the boom-bust cycle of most VR games/experiences. It’s also an experience the headset seems uniquely targeted for - wandering the home or apartment streaming over 6GHz Wi-Fi, hanging out with friends or going to raves, no umbilical needed or dodgy Quest support limiting the experience.
For VRC alone, $1300 is a very respectable price for the experience on offer, especially compared to the $1k “entry point” of the Index. Common man VR this ain’t, this is targeting the VR serious as well as those who value privacy higher than what Meta offers in subsidies. The 2D support is a clever way of justifying the higher price though, and giving folks a more private way of enjoying their libraries in non-gaming spaces.
You're fooling yourself if the quest provides any advertising data value, let alone 600$ The device is simply just being sold for as a loss and is not a data harvesting operation.
Some quick googling shows the ARPU of a meta user is approx 57$ a year, and ~65$ in NA. Even if the quest provided useful advertising data (it doesn't) it would never come close to 600$ over the lifetime of a user.
I don't even understand what you mean by "biometric data" for advertising purposes. What biometric data is the quest collecting? How in the world is biometric data useful for advertising?
There's a reason why Meta is tens of billions of dollars in the hole for reality labs. It's not to subsidize for advertising that's for sure.
For VRChat it has even more benefits - built in eye tracking out of the box and and expansion port for which rumoredly there should be an official project Babble lower face tracker under development. :)
I'm really hopping for a combined face/vive tracker, because calibrating the Frame to Vive trackers is going to be annoying without it.
That’s a big reason I’m buying it (along with the wireless freedom of movement). VRChat has been a godsend of socialization and authenticity, and I want to immerse myself into it more with FBT, ET, and FT/MT such that it feels like a proper digital self. I couldn’t do that in my apartment layout with lighthouses a la BSB or Index, but the Frame and modern SteamVR/OpenXR suggests this will be one of the best ways to immerse into VR experiences going forward.
The fact I can throw it into my bag and travel with it is a bonus.
vrchat is just weird enough (and for, maybe, weird people) plus the new user experience/children yelling slurs situation makes it hard to even bring up to general audiences
I do think hardcore sims and vrchat are the only good reasons to get into vr now, though