Pico 4's Black Friday deal sees the headset offered at its lowest price ever, and also comes with three VR games.
Pico 4 launched just over one year ago. The 128GB model is normally priced at €430/£380 and the 256GB model is normally €500/£450.
The Black Friday weekend deal, active from now until the end of Monday, temporarily cuts those prices to €330/£260 for the 128GB model and €400/£350 for the 256GB model. The discount should be available from all officially partnered retailers.
On top of the hardware discount, the deal also includes three free VR games: Green Hell VR, Warplanes: Battles over Pacific, and the upcoming blockbuster Arizona Sunshine 2 - together worth around €100/£80.
David Heaney
Pico 4 has specifications, and is usually priced, effectively at a midpoint between Meta's Quest 2 and Quest 3. It had dual 2K displays and pancake lenses a year before Quest 3, but uses the same original Snapdragon XR2 Gen 1 chipset as Quest 2 (with a less than half as powerful GPU as Quest 3) and lacks scene-aware mixed reality.
Pico 4 isn't sold in North America, reportedly due to regulatory scrutiny of TikTok, which Pico's parent company ByteDance owns.
While ByteDance has funded developers to port over a large percentage of the major Quest Store content, it's missing Meta's standalone exclusives like Beat Saber, Resident Evil 4, Population: ONE, and Onward. And given recent events, there are significant concerns about the future of the Pico platform.
Earlier this month ByteDance laid off a significant portion of Pico's staff, telling UploadVR it "decided to restructure the PICO business to focus more on hardware and core technologies". It also cancelled its own Beat Saber competitor and handed off its only announced major exclusive game, Just Dance VR, to a "new partner".
While ByteDance told UploadVR Pico will "continue to operate normally and provide its users with top-notch services", it declined to give us more specific reassurances about Pico's future plans.
David Heaney
Meta is also offering its own Black Friday deal, Quest 2 for €300/£250 with €50/£50 of general credit. That comes as Amazon Credit from Amazon or Quest Store credit for VR games from Meta Store.
Whether you consider that a better or worse deal depends on your personal desire for the three specific games on offer from Pico, how much you want pancake lenses, and how willing you are to gamble on ByteDance's uncertain commitment to VR.
You should also be aware that Meta seems to be planning to release a 'Quest 3 Lite' sometime next year, which could offer the new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset in a headset priced similarly to Quest 2 and Pico 4. If it's successful, developers could put less focus on making their games look good and run well on XR2 Gen 1 headsets like Pico 4.
Still, if you want a headset for this holiday season, this Pico 4 Black Friday offer is one of the best value deals we've seen in the history of VR. But if jumping on it, please keep in mind the platform has an unclear future.
