As promised last week, Nielsen game analytics firm SuperData just put out its summary of VR headset sales for 2019, starting with the most positive numbers:
Valve sold 149K Index headsets in 2019. Sales more than doubled from Q3 to Q4 (103K) thanks to anticipation for Half-Life: Alyx, which was announced in November and is slated to arrive in March. The Index sold more units than any other PC VR headset during the quarter despite a steep price of up to $1000. It would have sold even more if not for inventory issues (the device is currently sold out worldwide).
... The Oculus Quest sold 705K units during 2019, more than the Oculus Go and Oculus Rift S combined.
Emphasis mine, as it bears emphasizing. Almost exactly a year ago (January 24, 2019), SuperData's Quest forecast was much sunnier than this ultimate count:
Market intelligence company SuperData released its latest extended reality (XR) findings on Thursday. It believes Oculus will sell 1.3 million units of its anticipated Quest headset this year, and annual XR revenue will reach $11.5 billion.
So the Quest came up roughly 600,000 units short of that forecast. If that's accurate, I'm surprised (and wrong) myself, because back last August, I said the Quest looked likely to break 1 million sales. I've asked SuperData for its own interpretation of this shortcoming, and will update this post if I get it. Ironically, this happens just as (see infographic above), the Quest is starting to sell almost as well as market leader PSVR. (At least over last Q4 holiday season.)
Speaking of Half-Life: Alyx, the widely-anticipated, VR-only Half-Life sequel that many in games see as virtual reality's likeliest killer app, these overall HMD sales sadly point to a bearish picture:
On release, Valve's game is architected to run on Valve Index, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Quest (tethered to a PC) and Windows Mixed Reality.
And right now, looking at last October's VR install base numbers, and lining them up against these latest figures, there's now less than 1.5 million consumers who have a VR device that can run Half-Life: Alyx. (And no, no word as of yet of an Alyx port to PSVR; sales would probably need to be spectacular on existing devices for Valve to justify the risk of porting to Playstation's HMD.)
So this is where we're at right now. By contrast and comparison, the original Half-Life 2 now has over 10 million owners. As it currently stands, if every single owner of every single VR headset that can run Alyx bought a copy, that would still just be some 15% of the total.
Valve is really dropping the ball. I’ve had two friends on the wait list for the Valve Index since December. You still can’t buy one, even if you wanted to. As the best VR rig available, I understand people waiting for them to become available, but Valve better rank up production to match demand. People won’t wait forever.
Posted by: FlipperPA | Saturday, February 08, 2020 at 06:20 PM