Last week I attended an HTC press event in San Francisco where the company not only revealed the Vive Focus was launching in the US that day as an Enterprise-focused device, but they also presented hands-on opportunities with the Vive Focus 6DOF controller dev kit and revealed a new consumer-focused device based on the Vive Wave SDK known as the Shadow VR. The verdict’s still out on that one.
At that event I also got the chance to sit down with Dan O’Brien, General Manager at HTC. As it turns out, the only thing more difficult than getting a hint of sales data out of executives at virtual reality tech companies is trying to get a room of VR enthusiasts to agree on a preferred form of movement inside VR games. But I tried anyway.
“We are seeing year-over-year growth for both products, well not so much for Pro it hasn’t been a year yet, but the original Vive we continue to see that growth and adoption,” said O’Brien. “What we’ve learned with the price point of taking that down to $499 we have seen a very accelerated growth to the point that we were stocking out for the summer and had to update our supply chain and forecast.”
Basically it’s the same sort of answer we’ve gotten in the past from Facebook regarding the Oculus Rift and Oculus Go. In fact, Oculus’ Nate Mitchell told us Go was “beating expectations” and that the Rift was “performing well” in an interview back from September.
“We continue to see traction going into the holidays and with Vive Pro we continue to see accelerated growth of the full kit and adoption,” said O’Brien. “They want the larger tracking space and better headset. We are meeting goals overall. The Wireless Adapter is going great too.”
To put things into context, the most recent Steam Hardware Survey results show that while more polled users are using Rifts than Vives at this point, the margin between the two is shrinking as the combined approach from Vive and Vive Pro gains ground.
Unfortunately we still don’t know hard sales figures from HTC or Oculus. Sony on the other hand have revealed that over 3M PSVR units are out in the wild, which is huge, and it’s a number that is expected to keep growing as we enter the 2018 Holiday season. There are great deals out there for Sony’s headset and it has an excellent lineup of exclusive and cross-platform titles.
Let us know what you think!
