Here's My Predictions for Virtual Worlds & VR in 2021 -- What Are Yours?

Image credit: Klaus Reinherz, "Socially Distanced New Year 2020/21"

Here's mine:

• There will be a departure in Linden Lab's C-suite, i.e. CEO/COO/CFO/CTO.
• Both VRChat and Rec Room will finally surpass Second Life in peak concurrency numbers.
• Related to the above, either VRChat or Rec Room will be acquired by a major platform/company.
• Second Life's long-awaited "mobile app companion" will launch but see a disappointing reception, failing to earn over 100,000 downloads on Google Play.
• Sales of Oculus Quest 2 in 2020 will under-perform expectations: Despite a major marketing push, under 2 million. Slow sales will continue through 2021, with an install base under 3 million.
• Unreal and/or Unity will announce an official metaverse platform.
• Bowing to public and government pressure, Facebook will discontinue mandatory Facebook log-in for its Oculus headsets.
• Roblox will announce $1 billion in revenue for 2021.
• Core will announce a major platform partner or be acquired outright, with Epic the likeliest suitor.
• Apple will not announce its long-rumored AR headset in 2021.

Share yours in Comments below and I'll share my favorites next week -- the more concrete and easy to verify, the better.

Comments

[Joey1058]

All pretty spot on.

[sirhc desantis]

Yep sounds about right

[Matthew Lake]

I shared my thoughts in another post of yours, but I'll do it again here as it seems more relevant.

PSVR Sold 6+ Million. Oculus Quest has more interest in the past few months than the entire 4-year history of PSVR. See: https://imgur.com/dB28YP9

Expect VR to be mainstream by 2023. VR Growth will be exponential, just looks deceptively slow at first.

Prediction: 50M standalone VR headsets sold by 2025.

I think they Oculus had 2M already made by the holiday in December. Say they sold 1.5M Quest 1. They're currently producing 3.5M Quest 2 per year.

2023: 10M
2024: 20M
2025: 40M Quests (1-3) + 10M+ other standalone

VR will be much bigger than consoles. It's not just for gamers.

FB has already come out and said that Quest 2 is selling far more than they expected.

Chris Pruett: "The team "really couldn’t be happier" that not only were the sales “maybe a little bit beyond what we expected” Source: PC Gamer.

Mike Schroepfer CTO at FB: ""The Quest 2 is selling... [pause] well. Very well. Better than our expectations"Websummit2020

Quest 2 has been sold out almost everywhere for weeks. I don't know what you're basing your predictions on?

[Matthew Lake]

"Quest 2 surpassed the original Quest’s monthly active people in less than 7 weeks" FB Reality Labs.

https://tech.fb.com/no-looking-back/