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.

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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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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Wow dude

    Can’t believe facebook still doesn’t have a competition or 2 in the standalone vr market.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      The will arrive early next year, all based on the XR2 chip.. And well, the Pico Neo 2 is some sort of competition and so is the HTC Focus (but both aren’t as available as the Quest 2)..

      • h4rr4r

        With one controller the pico neo 2 is not a competitor. Same for the focus, which activation outside of an enterprise is grounds to ban the device

        • Andrew Jakobs

          the pico neo 2 has 2 controllers, and the even track behind your back out of range of the camera’s.

          • h4rr4r

            Sorry, the only units for sale were the first gen with one controller

          • Andrew Jakobs

            Well in our country they sell the Pico Neo 2 for 665,50 euro, and the pico neo 2 eye for 845,97 euro and both units have 2 controllers..

          • h4rr4r

            So way more expensive for a lower spec device.
            An 835 or 845 is not a replacement for an XR2.

    • xyzs

      Standalone means having an OS and a store ecosystem.
      That takes a long effort and a lot of money to be done, and also, the company and the platform have to give the feeling of being strong so people trust it and spend money for content.
      That’s not something easy any company can do.

      If HTC made their own OS based on Android like FB did, I would not trust the software ability of the company by example. I think a true Oculus competitor will be possible when hardware is not under strong RnD innovation needs, and that companies can focus more on the software competition.

  • Well, the price is lower and the ecosystem is riper, so this doesn’t come as a surprise. But 5X is a serious increment, and this is a good news

  • starchaser28

    Oculus deserves real credit for not botching the Quest 2’s launch like Nvidia’s 3080 non-launch insanity. This is what VR seriously needs right now to accelerate adoption. Although Quest 2’s are now back ordered 1 to 2 months on Amazon for the 64GB. It will be interesting to see if they can keep up with global demand this time around.

  • ShaneMcGrath

    5x higher, But it could have been 10x without the Facebook login!

  • עמית קיסר

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    On my sites you will find relevant information and links to cheap and safe shopping from Amazon eBay and more.

    Come and be a part of the fans of virtual reality in Israel since 2013