Update: Amazon has removed the Gear listing from its press release, replaced by a range of FitBit products. We’ve reached out to the company to find out why.
Original story: Amazon has revealed its best-selling products for the holiday season, and Samsung and Oculus’ Gear VR has come out on top for our budding new industry.
Earlier this week the online retailing giant revealed the top three products sold in the different categories featured on its site. Gear VR makes it in as the third entry in the Wearable Technology category. The company did not reveal exact sales figures for the product, though no other VR headsets or games feature in the list.
That’s not the only evidence that suggests Gear VR had a pretty big Christmas. On top of the Amazon report, Cubicle Ninjas CEO Josh Farkas revealed to UploadVR that the company’s app, Guided Meditation, had seen a huge increase in downloads over the Christmas period, reaching over 1,000 downloads on December 25th alone and passing the milestone again on December 26th.
As Farkas pointed out, Guided Meditation currently isn’t on the front page of the Oculus Store, which means some experiences may have had even more publicity. That said, the app being free will have certainly helped. The developer also added that the Gear version’s Total Active Users is nearly 1:1 right now, suggesting that the vast majority of people that downloaded Guided Meditation since it released earlier in the year used it over Christmas.
Of course, these could be downloads of existing Gear VR units, but at the very least it shows a big uptick in interest for the headset. Speaking first-hand, I’ve had two people I would have never considered to be interested in a VR headset pick one up this holiday season, much to my surprise.
The news is made even more surprising given the fact that the most recent phone to support the Gear VR, Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7, ended up being outright abandoned after serious technical troubles with the device.
We’ve reached out to Oculus and Samsung to ask after sales of Gear VR over the holidays, though neither has provided a total lifetime sales figure for the device at any point. Oculus did previously announce that over a million people had used that headset in April 2016, though that doesn’t necessarily mean over a million units have been sold. With the recent data from Amazon, it could have passed that milestone by now.
