Vive Leads Premium VR Device Market With ~100K Sales -- I.E. Total Western Install Base Likely Under 1M

Based on usage data, Road to VR is estimating the total unit sales for HTC-Valve's Vive VR system so far as about 100,000:

The margin of error brings the headset’s install base as high as 103,124 or as low as 86,698 three months since launch. To put this into perspective, Oculus sold some 175,000 Rift DK1 and DK2 development kits over the course of their lifetime offering (August 2012 – October 2015).

To put this in even more perspective, the Playstation 4 sold 1 million units in the first 24 hours of its 2013 release. By contrast, it looks like all sales of medium to high end VR units in the Western market -- Vive, Oculus Rift, and Gear VR -- is closer to 1 million total:

Gear has sold over 300,000 units in all of Europe, so assume North America sales around that number and we're at 600,000 total, added to this 100,000 for Vive, plus 175,000 for Rift developer kit devices, plus whatever the Rift consumer model is selling (assume 50,000-100,000), and we're hovering around the 1 million total mark. (That's not counting the low-end, Viewmaster-ish Google Cardboard.)

All that said, to say VR is still a very niche market is an understatement-- there's probably less monthly users of VR than users of Second Life. However, it's very much early days: The real numbers to track come when Sony's Project Morpheus VR system drops this October. However, if you're a VR enthusiast expecting millions of Morpheus sales, maybe heed the words of Palmer Luckey himself:

““It’s extremely unlikely it’s going to come anywhere close to modern game consoles,” he told me last Summer, when I asked him if he thought VR's growth would track that of next gen consoles like the PS4 or Xbox 360... Even looking at the most successful products in the world, like Kindle and iPod,” those took several years to get into the range of several millions shipped, he noted. “GoPro took 5 years and 2 models before they sold over 1 million.”

More on that here.

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Comments

[Carlos Loff]

Those very expensive gadgets, with prices fed only by crazy loose wallets consumers, will soon rest for ever on home shelves, gathering dust, the companies are launching millions of different bikes and there are very few short roads (content) to keep them riding = HYPE