While Facebook has yet to reveal official unit sales figures for Oculus Quest 2, various data points the company has offered, along with data from developers, has allowed us to hone in on a reasonable estimate. Compared to PSVR, the best selling VR headset to date, Quest 2 may be selling three times as fast.
Thanks to PlayStation VR’s leading sales position, Sony has confidently offered up official unit sales figures over the years while other headset makers have opted not to. The last data point the company shared is that PSVR reached 5 million unit sales as of January 1st, 2020. Here’s a look at the figures over time:
Interestingly, both PlayStation VR and Quest 2 were both released on October 13th (2016 and 2020, respectively), which gives us a very comparable timeline because it eliminates the variable of seasonal sales differences; if we could figure out the number of Quest 2 units sold so far, we’d be able to get a pretty good idea of how it stacks up against the sales rate of PSVR.
While Oculus hasn’t offered up official sales figures for Quest 2 yet, two data points can help us reach a reasonable estimate.
First, during the company’s Q4 2020 earnings call, Facebook said that Quest 2 was a major driver behind the $885 million in Q4 non-advertising revenue (which includes the company’s hardware products Oculus and Portal). With some conservative assumptions, we previously estimated this would yield around 1 million Quest 2 units sold in Q4, 2020.
Second, the developers of Rec Room, using their own internal data, estimated 2–3 million Quest 2 units sold in Q4, 2020.
We’re now another quarter (three months) beyond those estimates, which ranged between 1–3 million units. While more Quest 2 units have surely sold since then, sales in the first quarter of the year are unlikely to have kept the same pace considering that Q4 tends to be the most active thanks to the holiday shopping season.
With that in mind, we can split the difference between the estimates (2 million), and, for the sake of being conservative, assume that Q1, 2021 saw only 25% of the sales of Q4, 2020, leaving us with an estimate of 2,500,000 Quest 2 units sold through Q1, 2021.
So how does that line up with PSVR’s known unit sales? Here’s a look:
Looking at the same data by ‘time to milestone’ gives another tangible way of comparing the two:
| Unit Milestone | 1,000,000 | 2,000,000 | 2,500,000 |
| Quest 2 (days to reach) | 45 | 90 | 180 |
| PSVR (days to reach) | 137 | 420 | 549 |
| Quest 2 sales rate relative to PSVR | 3x | 4.7x | 3.1x |
That puts the overall estimated rate of Quest 2 sales at a little more than three times the rate of PSVR when aligning launch timelines.
This all tracks with Facebook’s claim that Quest 2 has outsold all prior Oculus headsets combined, and the data showing that Quest 2 has even become the most popular VR headset on Steam.
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To be clear, this isn’t an assessment of which product is better; in fact this is what we’d expect to find—that in the four and a half years since the launch of PSVR, VR in general has become more popular, hardware has improved, prices have fallen, and content has gotten better, paving the way for newer headsets to be more successful and widespread.
That said, we’re looking forward to seeing how Sony’s PSVR 2 will fare with all the advancements that have been made since the original, and how it will compete with Oculus’ Quest line.