Despite the growing age of PlayStation VR, Sony has continued to effectively market and sell the headset, leading to steady sales which have now reached 5 million units total, the company has announced.

Sony Interactive Entertainment said today that its PlayStation VR headset has sold an impressive 5 million units to date, likely making it the best selling tethered headset so far. Sony made the announcement today alongside confirming that it has sold 106 million PS4 and PS4 Pro consoles.

The three year old PSVR lags behind the latest headsets in features and performance, but Sony’s investments in building a strong VR content library, long term commitment to the headset (including announcing PSVR compatibility with the upcoming PS5), and agressive bundling & marketing has kept the headset selling consistently since its late 2016 launch.

Data courtesy Sony

The 5 million unit milestone, which the company says represents “estimated” sales from launch to December 31st, 2019, indicates decent but slowing sales for the headset.

Data courtesy Sony

2020 will likely be a more more challenging year for PSVR as Facebook’s Oculus Quest represents a similarly priced and easier to use option which doesn’t require tethering to a console or PC, and holds a number of feature and performance advantages over PSVR.

The expected (but not yet announced) PSVR 2 will need to offer a strong showing to remain competitive with Quest and its successor in the long run. Recent signals from Sony suggest the company remains firmly committed to VR, while its console competitor, Xbox, is still steering clear.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Uncle Right

    …meanwhile for Microsoft which has WMR it is not worth to combine the new xbox and wmr together. Dumb Microsoft.

    • VR4EVER

      Thats whats already puzzeling me about this gen Xbox. How hard can it be to add 1+1, right?

      • kuhpunkt

        That’s 2!

        • Xron

          3.14

          • kuhpunkt

            That’s Pi.

          • Alex

            ..max ;)

        • VR4EVER

          Phenomenally simple, isn’t it?!

    • I got a friend a Odyssey+ for Xmas and he was blow away by it. How hard would it be to just add support for existing headset Microsoft!

    • KLEEBAN KLIBAN

      I haven’t been keeping up with MS VR but I’ve always thought their Kinect would be super useful if applied to VR. That thing tracked your body even without lights, and seemed to have better speech recognition than PS Camera.

      I have PSVR and the camera is the most limiting, immersion breaking factor, even compared to the PS Move controllers. Too easy to get out of camera’s view so you have to constantly be aware of it which distracts you from the game world you are in.

    • sfmike

      American companies are all about quarterly profits and executives don’t look beyond that as a bad quarter means no bonus at best and loos of your job usually. VR has disappointed investment capitalists to the point I’m amazed it’s still around. I could easily go the way of 3DTV if corporate giants like Microsoft have their way. Facebook and Sony are our only hope.

    • Master E

      Maybe they will make the series X compatible with current HMDs. That would be great

  • gothicvillas

    Would psvr 5mil be more than all the rest VR headsets combined?

    • ShiftyInc

      Hard to say, as we don’t really have accurate numbers for the other headsets. But i doubt it, as oculus is selling well into the millions now with all their headsets, not to mention the other companies out there doing solid numbers. But PSVR is still the leading one. but then again more people have a PS4 then a $2000 PC.

      • shadow9d9

        Oculus does fine on even a 6 year old pc that was made for under 1500…

  • so in total… less than 5% of PS owners own PSVR. oof.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      That’s a good number for an addon that costs almost (if not more these days) than the actual console..

      • Mike Porter

        if you consider a head mounted display a mere addon, sure

        • Andrew Jakobs

          But it is.. It’s like the move controllers/camera.. Ofcourse it’s a great add-on IMHO, but it is an add-on.. You need a PS4 to be able to drive it (which IMHO is still ridiculous, Sony would sell even much more headsets if they also started supporting PC officially (just like the move controllers should be supported officially). Shame they went for their own AUX connector which in reality is nothing more than a custom USB3 connector, it could also have saved a couple of cents on the production of both the camera and ps4 as no custom parts would have been required.

          • Mike Porter

            let me ask you this: are tethered VR headsets simply “addons” for your PC?

          • Andrew Jakobs

            technically speaking yeah, a tethered VR headset is an addon for your PC. And yes it is a separate platform with it’s own games, but it still needs the PS4/PC to work, and with that, it makes it an addon, yes to us a very excellent addon, but still an addon.
            If your controller needs a PC to work, then yes, it’s and addon for your PC.. I’ve also got a lot of midi-instruments/controllers, and the ones that require another device to actually work I do consider an addon, the ones that can work on their own (like my keyboardsynthesizers, drum-computers and digital-saxophone) I don’t consider those as addon’s.. but I do consider my Roland MT-32 and addon to my PC or my other midi-keyboard.

            It’s just like the Move/camera of the PS3 or the Kinect with the Xbox, those are also platforms on their own, but they are also just addons to the PS/xbox as they are required to get those working.

  • Mike Porter

    Just a week ago I was comparing PSVR, Pimax5K and Index image clarity for a project. PSVR’s true RGB stripe 120Hz OLED is still pretty good with it’s non-Fresnel aspheric 100 vertical degrees lenses. Sony knows optics and knows what it’s doing and the hardware has not aged much and was definitely falsely labeled inferior to CV1 and Vive when it was superior in clarity. I’m not surprised it’s sold as many even with less marketing and platform support.

    Even now people still provide false information about PSVR’s hardware such as the lenses being heavier because they are heavier. In hindsight there was no practical reason for Vive and CV1 to go with hybrid Fresnel lenses as the measured weight difference is around 10 grams.

    • sfmike

      I hate Fresnel lens with a vengeance. They are just cataract simulators to me and need to be replaced with better options. I’ll take the PSVR or Samsung Gear lens any day of the week.

      • Immersive Computing

        It’s the Achilles heel of the Index. I’ve experienced the “glare” problem which looks like hazy bloom, but also a Fresnel lens effect in some applications (not god rays) where I can see illuminated Fresnel ring edges surrounding my FOV.

        This is very dependent on eye relief, and tends to occur when eyeballs are as close as possible to lenses.

        • Mike Porter

          The Index has 2 stacked lenses per eye and a total of 2 Fresnel surfaces, more than the 1 Fresnel surface on other single-lens headsets, so the god rays are much more noticeable.
          But even with ordinary Fresnels on other headsets the Fresnel surface provides almost no advantage with current fields of view and display panel sizes, it’s almost as if nobody in the industry knows optics very much and everyone simply parrot each other.

          • Immersive Computing

            Thanks for your reply. I read that fresnel were used on Vive to accommodate widest possible user group whilst minimising pupil swim?

            There hasn’t been any deep dive on the index optics yet “Optics and Clarity” says ‘ Coming soon’. Very interested to know more and why about the Index lenses?

            Was using Index this morning trying Art Plunge and The Blu at different frame rates and supersampling to experience the differences. 90hz with heavy supersampling (400% – 2080Ti) gave a clarity I’ve not seen before in VR headset.

          • Mike Porter

            Pupil swim doesn’t seem like an issue to me with PSVR’s aspheric lenses, nor is the eye relief range.

    • Immersive Computing

      PSVR has always impressed me, I was shocked at the difference in display clarity between my Vive and PSVR.

      As you mentioned, Sony knows a little about optics! https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5011c27da6d3b119bfdd746ed0b6d6bde6e6191de848526955007dadca37333f.jpg

      • Andrew Jakobs

        That was the same reaction I had, especially after I heard people bitch about the PSVR.. And then I put one on myself and I thought, WTF, this looks much better than the vive/rift, and it’s even a lower resolution..

    • Jeremiah Tothenations

      Totally agree, I found the PSVR to have a superior display and more comfortable headset than the Rift, shame about the tracking though, it’s achilles heel.

  • Greyl

    I’d imagine PCVR combined has still sold more, though, especially now we can add Oculus Quest in there. PSVR still seems like the PS4 equivalent of the Kinect (which sold over 10 million units), and not something for the actual loyal VR enthusiast market.

    • kool

      I doubt that oculus is the only by to cross a million the rest are in the low hundred thousands at best except for the vive. I don’t the quest has moved a million units yet.

  • dota

    Some say that PSVR is low resolution
    but I say , its the optimized best resolution.
    thumbs up
    Wish they make it standalone in next iteration
    as well as wireless one for PS connectivity

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Yeah, to me it looks sharper than the vive/rift cv1. I still don’t understand why they keep using those awful fresnellenses, the ‘ribbed’ image is ‘awful’, the sweetspot is small (so you’re bound to see the ‘ribbing’ much faster). But I guess it’s hard to use ‘clear’ lenses otherwise most companies wouldn’t still be using fresnellenses..

  • Mike Porter

    Somehow I’m not very impressed by a Sony product selling 5 million units in whole 3 years.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      I am, especially because of the price (long time same as the PS4 and now even more than the console itself), and the spacerequirements for it to actually have any meaning.. I know a lot of people just don’t have the space to even (safely) do standing VR, let alone limited roomscale.