GameStop executives have revealed that the last pre-order event for the soon-to-be-released PlayStation VR was the “Quickest Sellout” in the company’s history.
GameStop held its 2016 second quarter fiscal year conference call this week, and Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation VR, due for launch on October 13, featured quite prominently it seems.
According to Dualshockers, executives on the conference call revealed that the PSVR pre-orders, which first went up in March of this year, “quickest sellout in GameStop’s history,” with the retailer running out of allocation “literally in five minutes”. With the execs going on to state that there is “tremendous demand” for the new PlayStation 4 powered VR headset. Elsewhere the firm was quoted as saying Sony has virtual reality as a “very seriously, as a very meaningful driver.” Which is indeed encouraging. However, without solid numbers to go along with the claim, it’s difficult to gauge just how high demand really was in comparison to other hardware pre-order event. It’s nevertheless a significant indication that PSVR has found a market though.
This aligns with our own observations of stock availability at the web’s biggest retailer, Amazon, during the same pre-order period. Amazon’s initial stock allocation for the so called “launch bundle” ran dry in around 10 minutes after going on sale at 7am PST on March 22nd. Target and Walmart also faced similar levels of demand with their stock running dry on the 23rd and 22nd respectively.
Sony announced that the “launch bundle” would comprise one PSVR headset, 2 Move controllers, PlayStation Camera and of course everything that came with the original base headset pack, including all the cables you need to hook things up and the breakout processor unit as well as the Sony London Studio produced PlayStation VR Worlds.