Even though the Oculus Rift was available for pre-order since January we haven’t heard more than hints of happiness from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding how it’s going.
HTC, on the other hand, may have just dropped a very interesting datapoint regarding how well the Vive pre-orders are going. The device was available for pre-order at 7 a.m. PST today. HTC’s Shen Ye tweeted:
Woah, more than 15k units in less than 10min 😮
— Shen Ye (@shen) February 29, 2016
If those $800 pre-orders become actual sales when the orders start shipping in April, those 10 minutes would represent some $12 million in revenue for Taiwan-based HTC in a completely new product category. It’s not what an iPhone would sell in that span of time, but it’s still a remarkable figure for a new device and for virtual reality. Plus, it only represents a fraction of the virtual reality systems people tried buying from HTC today.
We’ve asked HTC for comment to confirm the figure or provide more detail.
Also, it’s hardly a fair comparison for a number of reasons, but the only other number released about VR’s popularity is that 5 million Google Cardboard viewers have shipped since June 2014.
