I’ve had a Meta Quest 3 since the start of 2024, and recently stick drift has greatly impacted both left and right controllers. Stick drift (or Controller Drift as Meta calls it) is where the analog sticks believe they aren’t centered when they are – so doing nothing in game may result in you running in circles. Beyond that, the directions weren’t working great either. Meta have a whole long troubleshooting process that can fix or hide the issue depending what’s causing it and how severe it is. There’s a factory reset of the controllers, headset itself, recalibration of each controller, configuring a dead zone for each controller, cleaning each controller, pairing and unpairing each controller and so on.
None of these steps worked for me, and from very recent experience, dealing with Meta support is a pain. Constant dropping of chat sessions by agents, repeated detailed questions and providing serial numbers of headset and each controller along with other criteria again and again, to then be told to wait for an email which seems to have at least a 24 hour turnaround time between each communication – there’s a lot to be desired there. Beyond that, if you have a faulty part of the Meta Quest, you need to go through all this to get sent shipping label information, send back your faulty components, and wait 2-3 weeks (this timeframe was given to me by one of the agents) to be sent a new or refurbished replacement. There’s no store to take this to in Australia either. On this point, I’d recommend buying via Amazon rather than Meta directly (which seems to be the only two options in Australia) so you can return if faulty and just get a refund.
Anyway, the other option here was to buy replacement controllers. This is where my bargain senses kick in and I over-engineer a solution to get the most value possible:
A replacement controller costs $129.99 and again in Australia, can only be bought from Meta (not even Amazon at time of writing). Two controllers, $259.98. That’s a lot when you can buy a new Quest 3S which uses the same controllers as the Quest 3, for $499.99. The headset is where most the hardware is, but the price difference on this values the headset at $240.01. Is it better to just buy a Quest 3S and reuse those controllers? As an added bonus, I’m not without controllers for weeks.
On top of that, there’s referral bonus – which over Christmas was doubled to $94AU but is normally $47AU. So if I refer to a friend and get them to create a Meta account and sign in once, I’d also get $94AU store credit. Plus, because I can buy the Quest 3S headset via Amazon I can get gift cards to reduce the price by 3% again ($15 less), and then use a cashback app (I use TopCashBack – referral link) which is 1.5% cashback on Amazon electronics – $7.50 cashback. These bonuses add up to $116.50, leaving the actual cost of the headset at $123.51.
Meta don’t sell headsets only, but if I could sell this for half the cost of buying the whole kit new at $250 which is being on the careful side (which would be helpful to someone who broke their headset and still has working controllers) let’s see how the maths works out:
$499.99 headset – $15 discount on gift cards – $7.50 cashback – $94 store credit – $250 selling headset = $133.49 cost for the two controllers. $3.50 for the second controller. There’s a bit of effort involved and it does depend on having to sell the new headset (used once for the account referral then factory reset). If I have to drop the price to $200 to sell it, it’s still worthwhile.
Extra note: I’ve linked and use TopCashBack, but this is different to something like Honey which provides discount codes and claims referral purchase clicks at any opportunity it can find.
From TopCashBack’s privacy page https://www.topcashback.com.au/dyn/browser-ex-privacy/ – be aware you are sharing top level domains with TopCashback so it can display a notification showing there’s potentially cashback you can get. There’s also some cookie matching. If you’d like some isolation, create another browser profile and install TopCashback into that and do your shopping there, but you’re probably entering sensitive information when shopping anyway. I personally don’t have a problem with the way TopCashback works. This appears to be the same methods that other services like Cashrewards and Shopback use.
