Gear VR and PlayStation VR Lead Q1 Sales; Oculus Rift Stays Low

The Virtual Reality market is keeping a very similar state than it was at the end of 2016, according with researchers at SuperData. Samsung’s Gear VR and Sony’s PlayStation VR are still the sales leaders in their mobile and advanced categories, respectivelly, and they are positioned far away from their competitors. On the other hand Facebook’s Oculus Rift has not been able to improve its situation despite a price cut in February, and it’s still the lowest seller device.

Samsung’s Gear VR device for smartphones is still the best selling VR device by a wide margin, moving 782.000 units in the first quarter of the year. The key to its success seems to be the bundle packages with Samsung’s Galaxy S8 devices, with the new generation smartphone having an even better reception than the S7 in the previous year. The Gear VR also allows compatibility with a wider range of smartphones, which is why SuperData doesn’t expect Google’s Daydream to present a serious competition for some time. The new mobile headset from Google sold 170.000 units. That said, another report from IHS Markit expects Gear VR sales to slightly decline this year due to a less aggresive bundling campaign, allowing Daydream to consolidate its position in the market.

As for the console and PC headsets, PlayStation VR is still sitting comfortably as the top seller, with 375.000 units sold in the first quarter of the year, with Sony predicting 2.6 million of total sales by the end of the year. The device benefited in no doubt of the release of Resident Evil 7 in January, which included a mode to play the game in VR which was exclusive for the PlayStation 4 version at the time of release.

At some distance of PSVR would be the PC devices HTC Vive with 95.000 sales, and Facebook’s Oculus Rift with 64.000 units sold. That is bad news for the Facebook headset, since it received a price cut in February in order to improve its pressence in the market, going from $599 to $499 for the headset and from $199 to $99 for the motion controllers. Both devices are expected to sell 553.000 and 346.000 units for the full year, which putting the latter in perspective is still lower than PSVR’s sales in four months.