Quest 2 Stock Becoming Readily Available Following Holiday Scarcity

you want me to post you every links of every retailers in Franceor not ? no problem doing so , and you will see that after every picture with quest 2 64gb it will be written AVAILABLE ! Why would they lie about it ? come on be seroious, the quest 2 is not selling as much as they want to and they are giving no sale numbers at all and they want us to believe demand is so high that it is difficult to get his hands on to !

I wonder if Facebook is just prioritising other distribution channels over their own website. The VR nerds go there to preorder, but the average gamer will likely prefer the usual sources that they know best. After all there is nothing to gain by ordering from Oculus directly compared to say Amazon.

My expectation is still that Facebook is currently selling fewer units than they produce and for that reason created the generous Asgard’s Wrath promotion as the PC gamer crowd has very likely the biggest potential to begin with. They are running that promotion way too long for me to believe it was just an event celebration of sorts – this is pushing sales.

I think there is a mix of what you want to achieve. Having every channel well supplied does suggest that you run a surplus production which press could interpret as low demand.
But if you have a little bit of an impression of scarcity you might get folks to pull the trigger earlier to make sure they have one when winter sets in or to put under the xmas tree.
I am willing to bet that anyone that tries to buy over the Oculus page will be able to switch to another distribution channel like Amazon. I am not sure the same applies the other way around if the Oculus site was the last source of available headsets.

I stay with my expectation that demand wasn’t as high as they hoped given the strong start. But that they will likely be able to correct for that with their Asgard’s Wrath offering (that really does sweeten the deal for most PC gamers a lot!).

I am even willing to speculate that the whole shitstorm thing they had going over early adopters not being part of the deal was a calculated move to create a lot more visibility. Not to mention that the requirement to send in the invoice (which is silly given that they could just give it to every HMD ID once), might have lead to collecting a lot of useful data! From learning what else they bought with that purchase to verified home addresses.

There is the sense of scarcity and there is actual scarcity. I was talking about why I might not prioritise having available stock on the Oculus website over stock on Amazon or BestBuy. The sense of scarcity is just a side effect, the overall dictating economic factors are of course the limited flexibility in production – which I also wrote and why I said they will rather try to raise demand to match production through the Asgards Wrath promotion than to scale production to meet the current levels of demand. Of course that also plays into the big play of dominating a huge chunk of the VR market.

As for the “manufacturing the AW outrage” – there are two options here.

Option A – a company the size of Facebook was not able to predict the reaction to this promotion ahead of time.
Option B – they did predict the reaction and then played through the scenarios that follow.

I have a tough time believing that Option A is really what happened. But of course that is an entirely viable option.
But I do consider the paths that could fall under Option B as well.

As for the risk – there is very little. The outrage created visibility. The sudden calming down created another wave of posts. You write on VR news, most of folks like me wrote about it in social media and Facebook. If someone knows the power of social media it is Facebook!
They own the game company and it was pretty simple to give everyone a copy. No big renegotiations involved.

What risk was there? The payoff was gigantic I bet! The mentions of the name alone will help the SEO a ton and everyone is happy to have gotten a free game.

Hell – because I talked about it on social media a stranger actually gifted me Hellblade on SteamVR and I got two free games out of this promotion.

Absolutely and that is why I put it out as pure speculation. The one thing that does make me curious though is them asking for the invoice. That seems like a lot of avoidable strain on their support system given that every HMD has a unique Identifier. Especially as they already use that system to identify the headsets that are activated for the first time! So it would have been a much easier tweak to just allow all HMD IDs a single content activation.
Facebook is all about user data and nobody is writing a single line about the data that comes with an invoice that Facebook normally has no access to.

I hope they give MOHAB away for free ….