Black Friday Meta Quest 3 deals are finally here, and they’re everything I wanted

Mark Zuckerberg wearing a Meta Quest 3 and looking happy.

(Image credit: Meta / Future)

The Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S are both finally discounted for Black Friday. Best Buy has rewarded our patience. Pick up a Meta Quest 3 ($499.99) and you’ll get a free $75 Best Buy gift card or grab a Meta Quest 3S and you’ll not only save $50-off full-price (now $249.99), you’ll get a free $50 Best Buy gift card too – did I mention you also get a free The Walking Dead game?

In the UK the Meta Quest 3S is down to £229 at Currys, while the Meta Quest 3 proper is £444.99 at Argos (a whopping £20 off).

While a gift card forces you to shop at Best Buy rather than being a proper discount if you had a few other items on your holiday shopping list these US deals are effectively a discount against those purchases, and while a Quest 3S price cut could materialize in the run up to Cyber Monday I’m not expecting we’ll see anything better than this Meta Quest 3 deal.

Today's best Meta Quest 3S Black Friday deals

They’re here folks, the Meta Quest 3 deals we’ve been craving (well, I know I’ve been craving them). Before now the best Meta Quest 3 deals in the US were nonexistent, and Meta Quest 3S discounts were just disappointing.

This duo of headsets are the best, and second-best VR headsets out there for most folks.

Why?

Well, hardware-wise, they are both solid devices with very similar specs. Their RAM and Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipsets are powerful enough to play the full suite of HorizonOS software we have at our disposal – including exclusives like Batman: Arkham Shadow and Marvel’s Deadpool VR – and they're both only a little over 500g which makes them fairly comfortable over exteded play sessions (I've use them for hours on end just fine).

Deadpool fighting Hand ninjas with kunai — Become Deadpool in VR! (Image credit: Meta / Marvel)

But their real winning factor is the HorizonOS platform. The Quest ecosystem is, without a doubt, the best standalone VR platform in terms of software breadth, as anything you want to do in VR is very likely possible on Quest. The same can't be said for its rivals.

The difference between the headsets (other than price) is their displays. The Quest 3 is outfitted with pancake lenses, which not only slim down the machine but also wipe out the blurriness at the fringes that can appear in the Quest 3S's fresnel lenses.

That said, considering the Quest 3S is currently around half the price of the Quest 3 in both the US and UK, this downgrade can be easy to ignore, and right now, while I usually would give the Quest 3 the win, I can see the argument that the Quest 3S is in fact the world's best VR headset.