The Meta Quest Pro is $400 off this week

Meta has given its professional Meta Quest Pro headset a temporary $400 discount, bringing its cost down to $1,099 in the US. The agreement, which according to CBS, running for one week in the US and two weeks in the UK for £1,299, at least temporarily alleviates a major point of criticism for the premium headset.

The Quest Pro offers a few important features that Meta’s $399 Quest 2 does not. It supports color passthrough mixed reality with front-facing cameras, and it comes with new, more compact auto-tracking controllers, as well as eye and facial feature tracking. The trade-off is a heavier design that we had noticeable issues with. For anyone specifically interested in these options, the price cut makes them a more attractive choice. Perhaps not coincidentally, the sale price matches HTC’s new Vive XR Elite, which includes similar features to the Quest Pro and will ship later this month.

Meta has pinned its hopes on “metaverse” virtual and augmented reality services as its former social network Facebook struggles to attract new users, but the technology remains nascent as competition intensifies. In addition to Meta and HTC, Apple may also finally being set to announce a long-talked-about mixed reality passthrough device. This week’s selloff could allow Meta to preemptively build its presence in a still fairly small market – without committing to permanently selling material at a steep loss.