During NVIDIA’s CES 2019 press conference the company’s CEO Jensen Huang took the stage to unveil the new RTX 2060 GPU with VirtualLink — that same functionality will make its way into RTX laptops as well. As an almost forgotten aside though, during his speech, Huang also revealed that four million PC VR headsets have been sold over the last several years.
Specifically, Huang claims, “Four million HMD VR displays have been sold for PCs in the last several years,” which, if true, is a solid number. He didn’t reveal any more details about that figure such as how many were Rifts, Vives, Windows headsets, or others, and he didn’t specify that timeframe, which means he could be including things like the DK1, DK2, and other pre-release headsets in that figure. It could include enterprise sales as well, which are definitely a very different market.
This all means if you’re a VR developer you shouldn’t take this to mean the potential market for your upcoming Steam VR game is four million people — it’s likely not that high. But this does corroborate the steady growth we’ve noticed on the Steam hardware surveys each and every month. In fact, over all of 2018, the number of PC VR headsets on Steam doubled, which is huge.
But until we know more about how he reached this figure or hear confirmation from the likes of Oculus, HTC, and Microsoft, I’m not sure how much weight I’d give this kind of statement, personally.
Now with CES kicking off this week we’re sure to learn more about whatever the is, see the new Pico headset, try out the Oculus Quest again, and see more from the likes of Pimax, Odin, VRGineers, and many others. As companies like Facebook continue to move towards mass-adoption via standalone VR, others like Valve are doubling down on the PC market with in-development hardware of their own.
The last time we heard from Sony they had confirmed three million PSVRs had been sold back in August, but that was before Firewall Zero Hour, Astro Bot: Rescue Mission, Tetris Effect, Borderlands 2 VR, and other big games at the end of last year released — not to mention Black Friday and the holiday season, which means they’ve likely eclipsed four million at this point all on their own, or are close to it.
Does this sound like a feasible number to you? Are you happy or disappointed in four million for the PC VR ecosystem? Let us know down in the comments below!
