In Facebook’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the Oculus Store had sold nearly $5 million worth of content on Christmas Day alone.

Zuckerberg says in the Q4 2019 earnings call that the Christmas Day boom was an “outlier day,” although it represents what he calls “real volume by any measure” and that it shows the progress the ecosystem is making.

While the Oculus Store provides hardware-specific VR content for the ‘tethered’ PC VR headsets Rift & Rift S, the 6DOF standalone Oculus Quest, and the more diminutive 3DOF standalone Oculus Go, this year’s holiday winner seems to have been Quest.

The standalone headset provides many of the top games made famous on PC VR headsets, albeit tailored to fit onto Quest’s humble Snapdragon 835 mobile chipset. Releasing support for Oculus Link a month before Christmas, Quest users can also now play Rift games too by connecting to a VR-ready PC with a USB-C cable.

Image courtesy Facebook

All of this combined with its $400 price point, and Facebook has managed to create a strong enough draw with Quest to send it out of stock since well before Christmas, with back orders still projected to ship in late February as stocks rebound from the holiday rush.

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Facebook hasn’t released any info on whether its holiday bump in content sales was primarily due to Quest or Rift S owners, although the PC VR headset refresh did experience a much smaller backlog during the holiday season. It’s unclear if this was based on higher supply or lower overall demand, however our analysis of the Steam’s hardware survey month-over-month for the year of 2019 reveals that Rift S increased its VR market share on the Steam platform by about 4% from November to December, which represents roughly 18.46% of total connected headsets through Steam. With most VR games, save a few Oculus Rift exclusives, purchasable through Steam, it’s very likely the Quest ‘walled garden’ approach has garnered the company most of its content sales during that Christmas boom.

You can read the whole transcript on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook post.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • fcpw

    Meanwhile, according to Apple, customers spent a record $1.42 billion in the App Store between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.

    • Lord Soth

      Sigh, there’s always one. Apple’s sales were ‘only’ $193m on Christmas Day. Given the huge disparity of installed user bases, the quest has done very very well. Apples and oranges…..

    • paleion

      Also, Beer sold well this year, and food is doing pretty good business. Cars have been popular products, as have houses. Electricity sold especially well in 2019 and gas sales have been very steady. But oil is outselling everything this year, its amazing.

      So yeah, screw you Oculus. You’ll never outsell oil.

  • https://www.caesarvr.com/…/what-is-the-future-of-reality-go…

    Hi friends, uploading an article that took me a really long time to do, I invested a lot of imagination.

    It’s time to make BIG LIKE , and also share, so I have money to keep up with my stories lol, enjoy the weekend.

    • aasdfa

      dude your site and business is so shitty. Like the most you do is stick labels onto vr hardware and sell it haha. But what do you expect from someone who goes onto other vr media sites to spam his own site…. Ill see you never.

      • Hi how are you
        Hope you take your pills
        I wrote an article and years of writing, what did you do? Who are you anyway? Anyway, have a good luck.
        visit me: http://www.caesarvr.com

        • aasdfa

          you sound like cancer.
          “It’s time to make BIG LIKE…” what are you fuckin seven years old? or is that just the crowd you relate to best?

          Followed up by begging for money…. yeah good one dude.

          and then on top of it you try to insult by making hacks at someones mental health and drugs…. realllllly good one dude.

          Im sure everyones just dying to hear about vr from someone with your toxicity.

          ill bet you 1k in a year your site sees no more traffic then the pitty traffic you get today by people laughing at how bad it is.

          • Zantetsu

            OK aasdfa. I’ve officially had enough of your infantile postings. Welcome to my blocklist!

            Hm … can’t add this person to my blocklist. Not sure why. Here’s hoping that they’re already kicked off of Disqus.

          • tnx

          • asdf

            looks like more people agree with me then you and ur hurt about that i can tell.
            but really uo disagree with me on this one? hes on here spamming his own site with shitty tactics and i call him out so youre mad at me…. lol okay most of the people downvoted him for the same reason, are you saying you like his site?

          • jj

            hes right though.

          • Zantetsu

            But there are much less infantile ways of making your point, right or not.

          • jj

            i think youre attacking the wrong person here. he was responding to a pretty crappy post to begin with. he does sound like cancer and his points are valid, he was begging for money, and he even made a joke about mental health.

            Why are you defending that guy? its almost like youre just here to oppose asdf and dont even care about whats being talked about.

          • It feels like Eminem – Stan
            You’re not carrying anyone in a trunk right?
            You haven’t answered yet why you don’t have a picture, keyboard hero.
            Anyway, everything is good for me
            Hope you find life maybe someone will take you without a picture

          • aasdfa

            what does having a picture on here mean? you’re literally the only one stupid enough to put your face in your image with your snowflake hair.
            if everything is good why are you on here begging for money in such a douche bag way?

        • jj

          hey making jokes at mental health is pretty scummy. I also will never visit your site due to how toxic you are.

    • jj

      wow thats cringy

  • airball

    I worked on a VR analytics platform back a few years ago. We collected usage data from a popular headset. For the 12 month period starting at Christmas, over 90% of usage of the headset was during the week that followed. It was unbelievable, but turned out to be true. It was a spike that just dropped off a cliff after a week. I wonder if they see similar retention issues with Quest.

    • wheeler

      This is what I keep reading/hearing over and over again but only second hand from those in the know (via podcasts and such)–the main industry players seem to not want to publicly admit it. It appears that outside of enthusiasts VR retention is really terrible. It’s certainly what I see among my friends and family members (some PCVR, some Quest). Shortly after the launch of the Quest, FB said something along the lines of retention being better than other headsets, but IMO that seems too early to really be significant–I have to wonder what it will look like for users a year or two out. Everyone focuses on sales but the real issue is retention.

      If this is also the case for Quest which has minimized the friction issue (at least as much as it can be with VR) then I think people will finally have to accept that the tech is just too early to go mainstream. The cost is subsidized, the content is there, the experience is streamlined, and the friction is minimal–if this doesn’t solve it, then the problem is the tech itself. Of course that doesn’t mean there can’t be a high end market that grows slowly as the tech improves, which would actually be much more normal if you think about the growth of other technologies. My hypothesis is that the experience is just too uncomfortable/fatiguing (in many ways) and the input is frustrating and “constraining” (at least currently, I could see future innovations solving these issues, except for maybe sim sickness)

      • I agree that it’s too early… but the same people of the market define these as the “early days of VR”. the Quest is a step forward, but we need many others

        • Malia

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  • Kimberle McDonald

    Everytime I see Zuck i half-expect him to be talking about Pied Piper :D

    • adasdf

      …okay

    • Alexisms

      He looks like Richard but is really evil Gavin!

  • NooYawker

    I remember reading VR porn requests shot through the roof on Christmas as well.