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.
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.
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.