This Year's Best Black Friday Quest 3S Deal Costs $47 More Than Last Year's

I paid $299 for a Quest 2 the week it came out, in October 2020. It has been sitting in a drawer since my Quest 3 arrived three years later. Six Black Fridays on, the cheapest headset Meta sells lists for $349.99.

Keep that number in your head this month, because most of the deal posts going around leave it out. The best Quest 3S price I can find today is a Best Buy doorbuster: $297.49 for the 128GB model, with a $50 Best Buy gift card. 9to5Google called it the Quest 3S doorbuster that is "the best I've ever seen." It is a good deal. It is also about $47 more than the same headset cost at the same store last Black Friday.

Last November, for comparison

This is what VR cost at Black Friday 2025, from UploadVR's roundup on November 28 last year:

• Quest 3S 128GB: $250 at Best Buy, with a $50 gift card, a month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and a free game. Costco went lower, $200 for members and $215 for everyone else, with a year of Horizon+.
• Quest 3S 256GB: $330 at Best Buy.
• Quest 3: no price cut, but Best Buy added a $75 gift card and a month of Game Pass to its $500 price.
• PS VR2: $300 at every official retailer through December 19, bundles included.

And this is today, November 14, from the stores' own pages:

• Quest 3S 128GB: $297.49 at Best Buy with the $50 card. The page says the doorbuster ends tomorrow, and when I looked on Saturday it already said Sold Out next to a Notify Me button. Amazon only shows its price once the headset is in your cart (Amazon, affiliate link); 9to5Google saw $297 there with no gift card. Meta's own store is at the full $349.99.
• Quest 3 512GB: $599.99 at Meta, at Best Buy and at Amazon (Amazon, affiliate link). Not a dollar off anywhere I checked.
• PS VR2: Sony does not sell it in the US anymore. Best Buy's results are Marketplace sellers, $818.21 for a bundle and other listings from $736.39.

Put the two lists side by side and the shape is obvious, because the cheapest Quest you can buy this Black Friday, on the one doorbuster that beats every other price I could find and only while Best Buy still has boxes, costs about what the same headset cost on an ordinary Tuesday a year ago, back before anyone at Meta had to write a blog post about memory chips. That is the market now. Not a scandal. Just the market.

Why the floor moved

On April 16, Meta posted a short note called "An Update on Meta Quest Pricing." From April 19 the Quest 3S went to $349.99 and $449.99, the Quest 3 to $599.99, and refurbished units went up with them. Meta's explanation was that "the cost of building high-performance VR hardware has risen significantly," and it named memory chips as the reason.

I believe Meta about the memory. Sam Whitfield laid out the DRAM numbers behind it for this site two weeks later, and a standalone headset carries a phone's worth of memory and storage, so when AI data centers soak up the world's DRAM, Quest buyers pay for it. What I do not love is that every deal post this month will measure its discount against $349.99, a price that has existed for seven months, and call a $297 headset the best price ever. It is the best price since April. Before April, give or take $2.50, it was just the price.

Meta has been here before. In July 2022 it raised the Quest 2 by $100, to $399.99, citing production costs, and softened it by giving away Beat Saber with every new headset through the end of the year. This year's version of that is GOLF+. Every qualifying Quest 3 and 3S bought through January 4 gets it, along with a premium course and 1,800 in-game credits. GOLF+ is $29.99 on its own.

When the price went up in April, I asked Meta in this column to bundle a game with the new price. A golf game it is. I have put hundreds of hours into Walkabout Mini Golf, so I am not exactly the person who gets to complain about the sport they picked.

One catch matters more than the rest, though. That GOLF+ offer comes with the headset wherever you buy it, at full price too. A listing that says "GOLF+ included" at $349.99 is not a deal. It is the list price wearing a golf visor.

PS VR2 had the best deal last year. It has no deal this year.

Twelve months ago a PS5 owner could walk into any store that sold PlayStation gear and leave with PS VR2 for $300. That was the best value in VR for that crowd. This year PlayStation Direct does not list the headset in the US at all, which Alex Reeves reported on November 4, and the old product page still returned a 404 when I tried it today.

What is left is a resale market. The Best Buy numbers above are Marketplace sellers, not Sony, and $736 is more than double last year's price for a headset whose list price never went above $399.99 after Sony's 2025 cut. Do not pay it. If you already own one, the software side is still running: Sony's Black Friday sale covers PS VR2 games through November 30.

The headsets that never do Black Friday

Some of the headsets people ask me about are never going to show up in a doorbuster, and it is worth knowing which ones before you spend the week before Thanksgiving refreshing store tabs and waiting for a price that was never coming. Quickly, then.

Steam Frame is $1,059 for 256GB and $1,299 for 1TB, plus a $29 power supply sold separately. Valve sells it through a reservation queue, and anyone signing up now lands on a waitlist. I am on that waitlist for the 1TB model, with no date. A sale price on a product you cannot buy yet would be a strange thing for Valve to do.

The Valve Index clearance looks like a deal and is not one for most people. Steam lists exactly two parts today: the headset alone at $399.20 and a replacement tether at $103.20. No controllers and no base stations, so there is nothing on that page to track it with. It is for existing Index owners replacing a broken headset, full stop.

Everything above that is priced for people who already know what they want. The Bigscreen Beyond 2 starts at $959, a cut Bigscreen made on August 31, not a holiday sale. Samsung's Galaxy XR is $1,799.99. Apple Vision Pro is $3,699, sold only by Apple.

If the person on your list wants glasses instead

Meta's cheapest camera glasses are the $249 Meta Adventurer. Read Alex's piece from this morning first, because that whole line just got a heat shutoff for when moisture gets inside. Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) is $379 at Amazon today (Amazon, affiliate link). Google's first glasses start at $395 and do not ship until December 10, which Alex covered on Thursday.

What I would actually pay

My numbers for this month, for whatever they are worth:

• Quest 3S 128GB: under $300 with something extra on top is a real deal this year. Best Buy's $297.49 with the $50 card qualifies. $349.99 with GOLF+ does not, because everyone gets GOLF+.
• Quest 3: $599.99 is not a Black Friday price, no matter what the banner says. Last year this headset was $500 with a $75 gift card. For a first headset, I would take the 3S at $297.49 over the 3 at $599.99, and put part of the difference toward a strap.
• A strap, either way: I run my Quest 3 with Meta's Elite Strap, which fits the 3S too, and I would not go back to the stock one. It is $69 at Amazon (Amazon, affiliate link) and $69.99 from Meta.
• PS VR2: nothing on the US market this month is a deal.

I would not sit around waiting for last year's $250, either. Meta has not said the memory costs behind April's increase have eased, and a doorbuster that reads Sold Out a day before it ends tells you roughly how many boxes there were.

Black Friday is November 27. The Quest 2 in my drawer cost $299 in 2020. This year, $297.49 buys its grandkid, if you are fast, and if Best Buy has another box.