Resolution Games, which has been making VR games since 2016, estimates that the VR industry currently has around 5 million active VR users.
In the VR industry it’s hard to find good data on the number of headsets sold, and even harder to find data on the number of actual active users. This week Resolution Games—which is in a good position to have insight into the figure—offered up an interesting data point.
On stage at AWE 2021 this week, Resolution Games CEO Tommy Palm announced that his company is spinning up a new division dedicated to AR game development. On the wind-up to the announcement, Palm noted that there are “5 million users in VR” across platforms.
“In the beginning [of VR] of course it was very hard, as a new platform emerges, to do multiplayer, because there isn’t the concurrency [of users] you need to meet other people. So the first games we released back in 2016 were single player experiences, but we had in mind that we wanted to do multiplayer in the future. […] Now you can [have enough concurrency for multiplayer]; we already have 5 million users in VR—not for [our] game specifically, but in general as a market.”
Given that there are clearly more than 5 million headsets out there (Sony announced back in 2020 that its headset alone has sold more than 5 million units) Palm is referring to some sort of active user figure, though the company wouldn’t specify if he was referring to a fairly standard metric like monthly-active users or some other definition.
A spokesperson for the company said Palm’s comment was “a rough estimation of active users in VR based on what we are seeing across platforms.”
Resolution Games is in a good position to have an accurate estimate of active VR users given that the studio has launched 10 VR games over the years and has built for every major VR platform.
We expect Palm’s 5 million active user estimate includes only fully-featured VR headsets like PSVR, Quest, and PC VR, but not older and more limited headsets like Oculus Go and Google Cardboard.