Wednesday, 12 August, 2026 UTC


Summary

Breakout VR rhythm game Beat Saber has been priced at $30 ever since its 2019 launch, and has never once gone on sale since. In a surprising move, Meta has quietly slashed the price of Beat Saber to $20 on Quest, SteamVR, and PSVR 2.

The News

Beat Saber is one of the best selling VR games of all time, accumulating more than $200 million in sales as of early 2025, and surely plenty more since then. Its breakout success was so notable that it prompted Meta to acquire the game’s developer less than a year after the 2019 launch.
Unlike many games, including other first-party Meta titles, Beat Saber has never once gone on sale or deviated from its $30 launch price. That’s why it’s surprising to learn that Meta has just cut the price of Beat Saber to $20 across all platforms, as spotted by our friends at UploadVR. Meta also confirmed this is a permanent price cut.
Another reason this is surprising news is that Beat Saber has only grown in value since launch. The game has added new features like multiplayer, higher difficulty maps, expanded modifiers, and new game modes. And Beat Saber’s included track list has grown from 10 at launch to more than 60 today. That’s not counting more than 250 tracks available as paid DLC.
In cases where games expand significantly after launch, some even increase in price. And justifiably so; Pistol Whip (2019) raised its price from $25 at launch to $30 after adding significant new features and content.
And we haven’t even touched on inflation. Beat Saber’s $30 launch price in 2019 is nearly $40 in 2026 money, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

My Take

So why did Meta drop the price of Beat Saber? My gut says the company is testing the waters as it considers moving Beat Saber to a free-to-play model.
Yes, Beat Saber has made staggering amounts of money for Meta. But its reign as a top seller has been dwindling in recent years as free-to-play games have become increasingly dominant on the Quest platform. Even though free-to-play games are ‘free’, they often earn more per player in the long run through in-game monetization. Below you can see the latest official Top Selling chart among Quest games, with free-to-play titles in blue and paid titles in red.
At #9 on the list, Beat Saber is lagging behind.
But, there’s a risk in moving the game to free-to-play, especially considering that it wasn’t designed with that monetization model in mind. It’s possible that making Beat Saber free-to-play would increase its average revenue generated by allowing people in the door for free, then hoping they will outspend the original game price by purchasing DLC. But there’s also a chance the move could decrease average revenue.
The key risk is that once the game is made fully free-to-play, reverting that decision (if the free-to-play model was worse for reveune) would be extremely unpopular.
Finding out if you can significantly boost revenue by reducing the price first, before taking the plunge all the way to free-to-play, is a prudent idea.
The post Hit VR Game ‘Beat Saber’ Gets First Price Cut After 7 Years, and I Think I know Why appeared first on Road to VR.