Why Oculus Quest’s high prices might make me return my headset

If you’ve been following the new Oculus Quest VR platform, you probably already know that it officially hit stores last week, and that it’s legitimately impressive. I was skeptical that it could match the pre-release “Nintendo Switch of VR” hype, but that’s as close to an accurate, pithy description as I can get — across the board, as I’ll explain below. Given how many years it took for Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft to establish themselves as platform makers, Oculus deserves a huge round of applause for creating a completely viable standalone VR platform in a relatively short period of time, and having a large launch library available.

That said, Quest’s pricing has left me with some buyer’s remorse, and I’m not sure if I’m going to keep the $499 unit I purchased for myself this weekend. Since Facebook gave a lot of Quests away — both to reviewers and everyone attending its F8 conference last month — you probably won’t see many articles with this perspective, but having purchased the hardware with my own money, I’d like to share some of the things that have been going through my head over the past few days.