Mark Zuckerberg: ‘Oculus Quest 2 pre-orders were five times higher than original Quest’

Oculus Quest 2 has celebrated a pretty successful launch, with some developers saying they’ve seen a dramatic jump in both sales and engagement across their games since the standalone headset’s October 13th release. Now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed during the company’s Q3 investor’s meeting that Quest 2 pre-orders were actually five times higher than the 2019 original Quest.

Here’s the bit from the transcript, which Facebook reconfirmed with Road to VR:

“This quarter we also took major steps forward in building the next computing platform. We launched Quest 2, our most advanced virtual reality headset, right in time for the holidays. It delivers a real sense of presence — like you’re right there with another person or in another place — and we’ve worked to make it accessible to more people. It’s lighter, faster, has a sharper screen, and a new price point of just $300. Pre-orders have outpaced the original Quest pre-orders by more than 5x and have surpassed our expectations.”

Of course, we aren’t sure of what that base pre-order number really was for Quest 1, however only a few months after it was launched in late 2019 it generated such a big Christmas Day boom in software sales that the company reported nearly $5 million in Oculus Store revenue—an unprecedented number. And that was with hardware backorders projected well into 2020.

In contrast, Quest 2 is still readily available in most places, and is currently only suffering from a comparatively minor backlog of orders on retailer sites such as Amazon.com and Oculus itself, which suggests Facebook is garnering even greater hardware sales in the short term than the original Quest.

The Quest 2 Sales Bump

Since the launch of Quest 2, many games have benefitted from the increase in consumer attention. Titles citing at least a doubling in sales (and some cases octupling) include Angry Birds VR, Apex Construct, Blaston, Bone Works, Pistol Whip, Rec Room, and The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets. There’s likely many more out there too, as other fan favorites such as Superhot VR, Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted, Moss, and I Expect You to Die undoubtedly gain new players.

To boot, unofficial sideloading library SideQuest has also seen a dramatic increase in new users, reporting 60,000 unique users and 4,880 fresh signups in only the third day.

Facebook Reality Labs’ Chris Pruett told Protocol a week after its October 13th launch that “[t]he device is selling quite well, faster than Quest did and maybe a little bit beyond what we expected.” At the time, it wasn’t certain just how well it was selling though, but this much is clear: Quest 2 is on its way to making another big holiday boom in content sales that will likely dwarf that of last year’s.

Image courtesy Facebook

And with greater sales volumes from new users, it’s much more likely that the standalone Quest platform will attract studios which previously passed up VR, meaning we’re going to see more and better games coming.

Whether that means a global increase in software sales across the entirety of the VR gaming ecosystem remains to be seen though. The planned follow-up to PSVR is still nowhere in sight, and despite a number of new PC VR headsets on the horizon such as the HP Reverb G2, Facebook’s retiring of its Rift platform has likely taken the wind out of many developers’ sails to build exclusively with PC VR in mind. Of course, there’s still Oculus Link, which lets Quest owners play PC VR games on both the Oculus and SteamVR platforms, however not all users will have a VR-ready computer capable of playing those games.

In effect, that leaves Facebook as pretty much the only game in town funding VR software, which it’s doing now exclusively for its Quest platform. And that’s definitely ruffled some feathers. Some new and existing users object to the recent forced Facebook login requirement which comes part and parcel with owning a Quest 2—something the ethical hacking initiative XRSI is looking to remedy fairly soon with the presumed release of a verified Quest 2 jailbreak. We’re still waiting to see it for ourselves in the wild, and you can bet we’ll report back when we do.

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