Turns out the company's less enthusiastic reports last month were not quite accurate at all:
In an interview at his Silicon Valley office on Friday, Mr. House revealed PlayStation VR’s sales for the first time, saying consumers had purchased 915,000 of the headsets as of Feb. 19, roughly four months after it went on sale... Sony’s internal goal was to sell one million of the headsets in its first six months, by mid-April. The company will almost certainly surpass that forecast... Sony’s primary competitors, Oculus from Facebook and HTC, have not disclosed sales of their premium headsets. One research firm, SuperData Research, estimates there were 243,000 Oculus Rift headsets and 420,000 HTC Vive headsets sold by the end of last year. In contrast, during the iPhone’s first three months on the market in 2007, nearly 1.4 million units were sold, and it is considered to be among the most successful technology products of all time.
This strongly suggests several market trends for VR:
- Investment in content for PC-based high-end VR (Oculus and Vive) will wane.
- High-end VR will be embraced mainly as a videogame console-based peripheral.
- Videogame consoles, with a market of 65-75 million each, will largely define the market for VR.
Which is totally fine, and expected. Hopefully we see more realistic expectations for VR, and less predictions that VR will be embraced as quickly and broadly as the iPhone.
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