If you're following VR news across various social media platforms, you probably saw this article on The Verge yesterday:
Meta has sold 10 million Oculus Quest 2 headsets, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon at the company’s 2021 investor day, giving the best benchmark yet for sales of Meta’s standalone VR platform since it launched last October... The news doesn’t come directly from Meta itself, but given that the Quest 2 relies on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 chipset to power its standalone VR hardware, Qualcomm does seem like it would have an accurate number for how many headsets have been sold.
This is hard to believe, because at the end of July, the install base for the Quest 2 was 5-6 million, based on Facebook's latest earning report. (Not to mention July's infamous face rash incident which placed the US install base at 4 million.) Given that hardware sales mainly surge during the holiday shopping season, it's seriously unlikely 4-5 million more Quest 2 units were bought in the last 3 months alone.
So I wasn't surprised, scrolling down further, to find this jaw-dropping update casually added to the bottom of the Verge article (but with no subsequent change to the clickbaitey headline):
After publication, a Qualcomm spokesperson reached out to clarify that the 10 million unit number that Amon stated on stage was “an average of third-party market size estimates from industry analysts, and wasn’t meant as an official disclosure of sales numbers by Meta or Qualcomm.”
Which is quite an update! Because what industry analysts are being referred to here? I can't immediately find any estimating that 10 million number in recent months.
Even more mysterious: Why cite industry analysts when Qualcomm itself should have direct knowledge of the install base, via production of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 chipset in the Quest 2 headset?
I've reached to Qualcomm with those two very questions, and will update when/if I get a reply.
Yep, Reddit is full of congratulatory posts with this story in the Oculus and Quest subreddits and any posts with the added paragraph quote are just downvoted. Go figure.
Posted by: Mondy | Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 12:53 AM