During an interview with Bloomberg this week, Facebook Reality Labs VP, Andrew Bosworth, said that Quest 2 has outsold all Oculus headsets combined, a significant milestone for a headset which has only been available for five and a half months.
Adding to a handful of Quest 2 milestones that Facebook has reported in recent months, this week Facebook Reality Labs VP, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, told Bloomberg reporter Emily Change that he believes Quest 2 is beginning to go beyond an early adopter audience and into the mainstream.
In response to Chang’s question about when VR will begin to see mainstream traction, Bosworth said:
“If you look a little closely, I think it’s starting to happen right now. The fact that Oculus Quest 2—in just a few months on the market—has outsold not just its predecessor, but all of its predecessors combined, is a tremendous indicator that we are now at that point where we have broken through from the early adopter crowd to an increasingly mainstream crowd.”
This is indeed a significant milestone, especially considering that Quest 2 has only been on the market for five and a half months, while the company’s first headset launched five years ago. Here’s a quick timeline of Oculus headsets:
- Rift – March 2016
- Go – May 2018
- Quest & Rift S – May 2019
- Quest 2 – October 2020
We’re guessing that Facebook is not including in the calculation Samsung Gear VR—which was an early smartphone-based Samsung VR headset made in collaboration with Oculus—though we’ve reached out to the company for comment.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Bosworth said that Quest 2’s price point was a significant factor in its growing traction; he said the company’s first VR headset, Rift, had an all-in cost of nearly $2,000 if you count the Touch controllers (which were sold separately for some time) and the PC required to power the headset.
Bosworth also spoke of the wrist-worn XR input device that Facebook is prototyping, saying that the company believes it will be a key input device for future headsets.
