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Comment by ffhhj | Hacker News Reader

How much is the cost of making all those Quests, and how much does Meta make in a year? It's weird they aren't giving them away for free, or at least with a cheap subscription plan. Seems very short sighted, maybe Apple is paying them to avoid Vision's demise.

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Nothing is free, even “free” cellphones w subscription are paying back the cost.

Ignoring that, like covid test kits, if you make something (useful) available for actual free, there is unlimited demand and all stock disappears immediately.

> if you make something (useful) available for actual free, there is unlimited demand and all stock disappears immediately

This is locally bounded. My community can provide free dog-poo bags. I doubt one could do that in e.g. rural Alabama.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. And when applied to ad ridden platforms the metaphor sticks very well.

They have been heavily subsidized. Throwing them out for free wouldn't do anything for anyone. People attach monetary value to product value intrinsically.

I say Meta is a heavy lifter that can fully subside them. They want us to strap an ad ridden device to our heads? Won't really work with the price higher than $0.

It doesn't matter if it cost $0 when it just ends up collecting dust. Quest2 go for just $200, that's already plenty of cheap for pretty much everybody. It's the whole software and content landscape that still isn't very compelling. Worse yet, they even do a terrible job of highlighting all the good stuff you actually can do in VR. They also do a bad job at bringing content into VR that could easily take advantage of it, e.g. 3D movies, porting old games into VR, etc.

As for ads, so far the Quest is still ad free.

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