Facebook isn’t really in the business of sharing how many VR headsets it’s sold, but it assures its Oculus Go headset is “off to a good start”.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said as much in the company’s Q2 earnings call this week, as transcribed by The Motley Fool. During his opening remarks for the call, Zuckerberg noted that Facebook was “making a lot of progress” in VR, adding: “Oculus Go is off to a good start. And at $199, it’s going to be how a lot of people experience virtual reality for the first time.”
It’s impossible to gauge exactly what Zuckerberg considers a ‘good start’ for Go, but we do know both Facebook and Oculus have high hopes that the headset will help bring about mass adoption of VR. Launched in May, Go is designed as a low-cost entry point for VR, and doesn’t require any external hardware to run, though it lacks crucial features like positional tracking and the computing power of the machines that run its high-end sibling, the Oculus Rift.
Since Rift’s launch over two years ago Facebook has failed to provide sales data for the device, so we’re not confident we’ll see concrete statistics for Go anytime soon, either.
Later in the call, Chief Financial Officer Dave Wehner was asked about long-term growth for the company. He explained that investments in both AR and VR made up a big part of that future. “Those are things that will play out; AI in the nearer term but the investments in AR and VR are really about building the next generation of computing and that’s got a longer-term return window,” Wehner said. “So attractive investments we believe, but ones that will take longer term to pay off and those would have a dilutive effect on margins in the near term.”
