Oculus co-founder and Rift inventor Palmer Luckey says the original Oculus Rift and Gear VR headsets sold “well over” 10 million units combined.
Luckey made the claim on Sunday in response to a CNBC article. In the article, another Oculus founder, Jack McCauley, claimed VR would never breakthrough into the mainstream. He backed up his stance by stating that the Oculus Rift’s first development kit (DK1) had only sold 70,000 units and its second (DK2) sold 150,000. McCauley, however, left Oculus in 2015 before the launch of the consumer Oculus Rift in 2016.
CNBC, meanwhile, cited estimated sales data from analytics market research group SuperData in saying Oculus Go had sold two million units, Quest had sold 1.1 million units and Rift had sold 547,000 units since the start of 2018. These numbers have never been confirmed by Oculus itself. In fact, Luckey himself has downplayed their accuracy on numerous occasions.
Rift + Gear = 10 Million
In his tweet, Luckey refuted these claims, noting the lack of lifetime sales for the original Rift and Gear VR. He called the two the “best-selling” devices on the Oculus platform. “Combined, they sold well over 10 million units,” Luckey said. “Seems like a “hit” to me.”
This article lists (supposed) sales figures for every headset on the Oculus platform except the two longest-running and best-selling devices (Rift CV1 and GearVR), which it fails to mention even by name. Combined, they sold well over 10 million units. Seems like a “hit” to me. https://t.co/MZyRM10dGy
— Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) July 14, 2019
Again, Oculus has never provided sales data for the Rift so it’s hard to pick apart this figure. In January of 2017 Samsung, which partnered with Oculus on the phone-based Gear VR, said the headset had sold five million units. It’s never been confirmed, however, if this figure included headsets given away for free in bundles and at industry events. Oculus, meanwhile, gave away free Rift headsets to Kickstarter backers.
Luckey left Oculus owner Facebook in March 2017. Again, it’s not clear if his tweet is referencing sales up until that point or beyond. We’ve reached out to both Luckey and Facebook to see if we can get a clearer picture of this data.
