Heard on the Street: Oculus headset sales are growing, but it still qualifies as a niche product relative to Facebook parent Meta Platforms’ ambitions
sold about 5.5 million units of its tethered PlayStation VR headset in the fiscal years 2019 to 2021, according to consensus estimates from Visible Alpha. That is equivalent to about 12% of the total PlayStation console units the company sold in that time.has long made clear that his ambitions for Oculus go well beyond gaming, the company’s name change two months ago significantly raised the stakes on that bet.
Hence, a company banking its future on the metaverse will have to get a lot more devices into a lot more hands. Estimated Oculus sales over the past five years amount to less than 3% of Facebook’s daily user base in North America and Europe—the two markets that account for the vast majority of its business. It also is anyone’s guess how many people who got a headset for Christmas will be anything but casual users.
Facebook’s metamorphosis assumes that enough people will be willing to invest a few hundred dollars to plug into a virtual world controlled by a company with serious public trust issues now generating more than $110 billion a year in advertising revenue. Getting VR headsets under the Christmas tree may prove to be the easy part.