Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a call with investors that “on Christmas Day, people bought almost $5 million worth of content in the Oculus Store.”
We hoped Facebook might finally break its silence and reveal how many Oculus Quests sold during its debut year but the $5 million figure is still an interesting number. In June 2019, a Facebook vice president said Oculus Quest sold $5 million worth of content over its two week launch period.
“Sales are stronger than we expected,” Zuckerberg also said of the Oculus Quest.
In another section of the call Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said, while referencing the company’s “Other” revenue, which includes Facebook’s VR efforts, “year over year growth was driven by sales of Oculus Quest.”
The Oculus Quest standalone headset has been backordered from some places as far as March. The company finished 2019 with nearly 45,000 employees and continues to invest considerably in a wide range of technologies fundamental to advances in VR and AR.
The content sales figure is difficult to parse and not nearly as useful as it would be to have the number of Oculus Quest units sold. Regardless, a number of Oculus Quest developers who made it through the strict curation process on Quest indicated strong reception on the headset. Unlike its Rift PC VR platform, Facebook carefully curates which software products are allowed to be sold via the Oculus Quest store. There is, however, SideQuest and sideloading that allows some developers to distribute their VR games without receiving approval for release on the Oculus Store.
