VR Christmas hits? Not enough for the metacosm

Sales of VR devices are growing, but that's not enough relative to the ambitions of Facebook's parent company, Meta.

On Christmas Day, Meta's virtual reality app Oculus topped the U.S. market, with daily active users up 90 percent from the same day the year before.

After acquiring Oculus for $2 billion in 2014, Facebook never regularly disclosed its sales figures. But IDC estimates that Oculus' VR devices will sell between 5.3 million and 6.8 million units in 2021.

In either case, it's a big jump from last year's estimated 3.5 million units.

That's much better than Oculus's sluggish sales before 2019. Prior to this, VR devices mostly needed to be connected to high-performance PCs. This "shackle" severely limits the appeal of VR devices.

According to Visible Alpha's general estimates, Sony sold about 5.5 million PS VR headsets in fiscal years 2019-2021, which is only about 12% of the total sales of PS consoles in the same period.

It's not enough

Zuckerberg has been clear that his ambitions for Oculus go far beyond gaming, and the news of the company's name change two months ago greatly increased that bet.

Proponents of the metaverse concept insist that while the metacosm isn't just about virtual reality. But virtual reality is one of the main technologies that distinguishes this virtual world from merely browsing the Internet through computers and mobile devices.

Stephanie Llamas, a senior VR market analyst at VoxPop, said:

"Without virtual reality, there is no sense of presence. And presence is key. ”

So a company that is pinning its hopes on the metaverse must get more people to own more devices.

It's estimated that Oculus' sales over the past five years are less than 3 percent of Facebook's daily user base in North America and Europe, and these two markets account for the vast majority of Facebook's business.

On the other hand, there's also speculation that how many users who receive Oculus devices at Christmas are really used for entertainment, as Zuckerberg has recently been increasingly holding internal meetings in virtual reality, according to the Wall Street Journal, and some of Oculus' recent sales may have come from Meta's own employees.