Our interpretation of virtual reality’s commercial success is almost entirely anecdotal and relatively-uninformed. It has to be. Most of the major players won’t tell us VR’s adoption rate in actual sales figures. Sony is the only one who will, and it announced that PlayStation VR was at 2 million sales as of last December.
This near-universal non-disclosure has led to the widespread assumption that VR hasn’t taken off like many people thought it would. The most negative assessment of the situation is that VR is dying. Not so says Vive.
In a recent blog post on its site, Vive explicitly refutes the notion that VR is dying. Vive calls those claims “greatly exaggerated” and “not the whole story.” This feels like a good place to remind everyone that Vive is a company that would benefit greatly from people not thinking that VR is dying. In fact, Vive would benefit most if people thought VR was healthy and growing and profitable.
As for the actual reality, who knows? It’s impossible. But Digital Trends wrote a report last week — Vive’s post seems to be positioned as a direct response to this — that states Vive sales (and most VR sales in general) have plummeted. Vive says sales are down because its headset is so popular. “Vive has paced at its highest sales velocity of all-time, for weeks on end, and we sold out,” Vive states. “For a consumer electronic product in its third calendar year, this continued trajectory is nearly unheard of.”
Source: Destructoid Vive refutes the notion that VR is dying, cites ‘highest sales velocity of all-time’ without revealing numbers