Facebook’s newest VR headset may have sold millions in just three months.
What you need to know
- Developers of VR app Rec Room estimate, based on the app’s adoption rate, that 2-3 million Oculus Quest 2s have been sold.
- Facebook originally launched the Quest 2 in October 2020, so the new headset is just three months old.
- While we don’t have exact numbers, Rec Room provides a barometer for the Quest 2’s sales figures.
The developer of a popular VR app estimates that, in the three months since the Oculus Quest 2 launched, Facebook’s new virtual reality headset might have sold almost 3 million units. Even the lowest estimate would still put the sales in seven digits, which would mean it has eclipsed its predecessors in popularity.
Facebook has not yet released official sales figures for the Quest 2, so we can only make educated guesses as to how many Quest 2s have sold so far. One such guess came from Shawn Whiting of Rec Room, the developers of the free VR social app of the same name. Rec Room made our list of best Oculus Quest games to play in 2021, specifically as the best free game for the headset.
Seeing people talking about 1M Quest 2 headsets sold. Here’s a @recroom slack msg 🙂”The actual number is prob more like 2-3M Quest 2s in Q4. We saw 1M *new* Quest users in the past 3 months. Guessing our attach rate is 40% or lower. We def haven’t gotten to all of them yet”
— Shawn Whiting (@ShawnRecRoom) February 5, 2021
Whiting reveals in the tweet above that Rec Room had 1 million new active users on Quest in Q4 2020. The developers estimate that the adoption rate of Rec Room is around 40%. If that’s true, then it would put the sales figure between 2-3 million units sold. Even if Rec Room was used by 100% of new Quest 2 users, that would still mean over a million headsets were sold.
The original Quest was also extremely popular, accounting for nearly half of all VR headsets sold in 2019. Facebook has also made the Quest 2 more of a commercial presence, promoting its ease of use and the lack of a tether to a PC. Mark Zuckerberg revealed in a Facebook earnings call last October that the Quest 2 was preordered 5x more than the Quest and had far exceeded the company’s expectations.
