Rec Room isn’t just one of the best free social VR apps out there. In the absence of hard sales data, it makes for an excellent watermark for how things are moving in the industry. Now, according to Rec Room’s downloads on Quest 2, the developers estimate that Facebook has potentially sold upwards of three million Quest 2 units in 2020 Q4 alone.
We’re no closer to knowing precisely how well the Quest 2 launch went, however Rec Room’s Shawn Whiting says the studio’s download data may point to a ballpark figure of two to three million Quest 2s sold between the headset’s October 2020 launch and the end of the year.
If the attach rate of 40% is close to accurate, that would put it somewhere near 2.5 million Quest 2 headsets sold before the beginning of 2021. Even supposing however that Rec Room had a hypothetical 100% attach rate, one million headsets sold in the first three months isn’t something to sneeze at—that alone would likely make it the fastest-selling VR headset to date.
At least when speaking directly to investors, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has historically downplayed its XR projects, couching both its AR and VR aspirations as long-term investments. And while Facebook probably won’t release any hard data on hardware sales until a future product is in sight, Zuckerberg said in an earnings call late last month that Quest 2 is “on track to be the first mainstream virtual reality headset.”
What Zuckerberg considers mainstream isn’t well-defined, however at Oculus Connect 5 in 2018, the company’s XR developer conference, he said that 10 million VR users was an important milestone for the company to reach in order to make a sustainable ecosystem for VR developers. Facebook might not be there yet, but another equally successful product launch could put them in a good position to live up to that self-imposed inflection point.