It Sure Looks Like Oculus Quest 2 Sold Between 1.5M - 2 Million Units in 2020

Ian Hamilton of UploadVR caught an interesting point in Facebook's latest earnings call/report:

Quest 2 “is on track to be the first mainstream virtual reality headset,” Zuckerberg said during the call... Facebook didn’t provide any specific figures for how many Quest headsets it sold. However, the company’s revenue in its non-advertising “other” category grew in the last three months of 2020 from $346 million in the same period of 2019 to $885 million in 2020. Oculus Quest 2 launched in October with a lighter, more powerful and less expensive follow up to the 2019 first edition of the headset.

"Other" almost entirely comprises sales of Oculus Quest headsets and software sales from the Oculus store. Given that Oculus Quest 2 hit the market in October 2020, we can make a fairly accurate estimate of how many units it sold in its first three months:

• Assume the $539 million revenue jump from Q4 in 2019 to Q4 in 2020 is almost all from Oculus Quest 2 sales.
• Assume 80% of Oculus Quest 2 buyers paid the standard, entry level $299 MSRP, with 20% paying for the $399 deluxe version.
• Assume purchase rates of Oculus Quest 1 games in Q4 2019 were roughly the same as purchase rates of Oculus Quest 2 games in Q1 2021.

That comes out to 1,712,315. 

So as a ballpark estimate, it's safe to say Oculus Quest 2 sold between 1.5 million to 2 million units in 2020.

Which is still quite far from "mainstream", even by the 10 million target Zuckerberg somewhat arbitrarily set last year. By contrast, the Playstation 5 sold over 2 million units in its first two weeks on the market.

But still definitely a bit better than Quest 1's total install base of some 1 million. Last month I predicted "Sales of Oculus Quest 2 in 2020 will under-perform expectations: Despite a major marketing push, under 2 million", which still sounds accurate, but let's see what numbers SuperData and other analysts report. (Probably using the very same back-of-envelope math that I just employed, but with impressive-looking infographics to make it seem more authoritative.)

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

It was destined to success but Facebook just couldn’t be reasonable. VR enthusiast communities actively recommended people not to buy them. The tech was near perfect. They could have been so great if they actually had people’s best interests in mind,

[Joey1058]

I agree with Adeon. Everyone that owns an Oculus device knows that they are going to be targeted for ads. It was a given that people were willing to accept. This nonsense demanding default world identifications only was like shooting themselves in both feet with a shotgun.