Early indicators suggest that Facebook’s new Oculus Quest VR headset is seeing solid sales, but it doesn’t seem to be a blockbuster. Still, some estimate that Facebook could sell more than 1 million units in 2019.
Facebook has yet to release any official sales numbers for the Quest, which was officially released last month. The company did drop one data point this week to show that the Quest is on the right track, with Facebook vice president Andrew Bosworth telling the audience of the Code conference that the company had sold $5 million in content in the first 2 weeks following the Quest’s debut.
This revelation prompted AR and VR consultant Nima Zeighami to do some quick back-of-the-envelope math, with Zeighami estimating that Facebook may have sold fewer than 100,000 Quests in the first 2 weeks. Zeighami based his math on the assumption that each Quest owner may have bought 2 titles, spending about $50 on average.
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A Facebook spokesperson didn’t directly respond to those estimates, but sent Variety the following statement: “Early momentum on Quest is very promising, but we still have a lot of work to do as a company / industry to make VR mainstream and a self-sustaining industry.”
Other publicly available data points suggest that this estimate could be roughly accurate. The Oculus mobile app, which is necessary to activate a newly-bought Quest, has seen a significant growth in downloads, with app analytics specialist Sensor Tower estimating that the app has been downloaded by about 115K new users across iOS and Android in the 21 days following the Quest’s launch.
CREDIT: Courtesy of Sensor Tower
“That’s about 47K more installs than the 68K it saw during the 21 days leading up to the launch,” said Sensor Tower head of mobile insights Randy Nelson. Downloads of the app, which can also be used to manage other Oculus headsets, had been fairly stable ever since the end of the holiday season. (It’s worth noting that users of other Oculus headsets may have bought the Quest as well, which wouldn’t have resulted in a new app download.)
“Based on the daily average that were potentially sold and the number of days remaining in 2019, I’d say given a strong marketing push during the holidays they could definitely exceed the one million sales mark for the year I’ve seen projected,” Nelson said. “It’ll just take some work.”
One major factor that could have a significant impact on sales is the availability of the Quest. The headset quickly sold out across a number of major retailers following its launch. Availability remains spotty, with Amazon estimating delivery times of up to 2 months for the 128 GB version of the headset at the time of writing, and Best Buy listing the 64GB version as sold out.
“We’re so glad to see the excitement and interest in Oculus Quest,” a Facebook spokesperson told Variety at the end of May. “While some of our retail partners are temporarily out of stock online, we’re working to restore availability in all channels as soon as possible.”
Update: This post was updated with a statement from a Facebook spokesperson.