Meta’s Quest 2 has bought 14.8 million items since launch, IDC estimates.

IDC (Worldwide Information Company) is an analyst agency promoting studies detailing its estimates of market dimension, market share, and unit gross sales of fashionable merchandise. Analysts have a tendency to make use of sources within the provide chain, although their accuracy can differ wildly, particularly for decrease quantity merchandise.

IDC’s Francisco Jeronimo wrote on Twitter that with nearly 15 million items bought (after 20 months available on the market) Quest 2 is “probably the most profitable VR headset to this point”. He additional claimed VR gross sales grew 97% final 12 months, and 242% within the first quarter of this 12 months.

For comparability, PlayStation 5 has formally bought 20 million items, and estimates put Xbox Sequence X & S collectively at over 14 million. Sure, if these estimates are right, Quest 2 has bought extra items than the brand new Xbox consoles.

.@MetaQuestVR OculusQuest2 is probably the most profitable #VR headset to this point. With almost 15mn items bought since its announcement at @fb Join 7 in Sep 2020, the Quest2 has contributed to large progress in VR gross sales & client adoption🏆

👉VR Gross sales grew 97% in 2021 & 242% in 1Q22 pic.twitter.com/7dIe42FSo7

— Francisco Jeronimo (He/Him) (@fjeronimo) June 6, 2022

So, are these estimates correct? Meta doesn’t formally reveal {hardware} gross sales figures, however there have been clues to Quest 2’s success prior to now.

In March 2021 now-CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed Quest 2 “outsold not simply its predecessor, however all of its predecessors mixed”. A product recall in July 2021 confirmed 4 million Quest 2 facial interfaces had been bought within the USA, each individually and included with the headset.

Most instantly, the CEO of Qualcomm – the corporate behind the Snapdragon XR2 chip powering Quest 2 – mentioned in November “Quest 2 was 10 million items”. A Qualcomm spokesperson backtracked on that assertion saying it was “a median of third-party market dimension estimates” – however this might merely be an announcement to avoid wasting face with Meta given their relationship on Quest 2.

If Quest 2 actually did attain 10 million in November, 13 months available on the market, it appears cheap that after 20 months it might now be at 14.8 million.

A phrase of warning nevertheless: Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has been vital of analyst estimates of VR gross sales prior to now. “What I can say is that analysts generally are horrible”, he wrote in 2019. Nevertheless, Luckey’s criticism has primarily been geared toward IDC’s competitor, SuperData.