Having kept one eye on Quest 3 and Quest 3S deals consistently over the past year, I’ve been frustrated at the dry spell of sales on these two devices since they came out in October 2023 and October 2024, respectively.

At 10% off, you save $30 off the usual $300 list price. But the deal is a little sweeter than it appears at first. Each headset also comes with a copy of Batman: Arkham Shadow, which would otherwise cost $50. Not a gamer, or just not enticed? Meta is throwing in three free months of Meta Quest+.

Quest+ is a subscription service that offers access to more than 25 games, a list that grows with monthly drops of new games. It includes multiplayer access, too. Normally, it costs $8 per month or $60 per year.

All added up, that’s $108 worth of discounts and free stuff.

Meta Quest 3S: the best cheap VR headset

Remember when VR was going to revolutionize the world, and all it needed was an affordable ambassador to carry it from the enthusiastic few to the masses? I got on board the VR train when Samsung gave away original Samsung Gear VRs in 2016 with purchases of their Galaxy S7 smartphones, promising a future of affordable VR for everyone.

Well, nine years later, the Meta Quest 3S occupies the lonely shallow end of the VR market almost unchecked by the competition. A more budget-oriented version of the Quest 3, it is nonetheless a marked upgrade from the Quest 2.

I’ve used the Quest 3S, and while its Fresnel lenses aren’t as high-end as the Quest 3’s pancake lenses, the overall video quality is still quite very good, with sharp definition from its 1832 x 1920 pixels per eye. And while bulkier than the Quest 3, the Quest 3S’s headset straps stay snug and don’t loosen, no matter how much I shake my head around.

There are the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro, the $800 HTC Vive XR Elite, the $700 HTC Vive Pro 2, and Meta’s own $500 Quest 3, but truly impressive, fully featured VR headsets below $500 are truly uncommon.

Perhaps the market figured that those most attracted to VR headsets were enthusiasts who’d pay a pretty penny for them, and so the entry-level market never really took off in the way that the Samsung Gear VR (and, to an extent, Google Cardboard) envisioned.

I get it. VR is expensive, and not everybody wants to drop $500 or more for a headset. The Quest 3S is a fantastic value at $300, though, with hardware (and an experience, to boot) much closer to the pricey headsets than the Gear VR and Google Cardboard could ever hope to be.