Mark Zuckerburg reveals interesting new sales figures during a Q4 2019 earnings call.

If you were one of the poor souls desperately trying to purchase an Oculus Quest this holiday season, you know better than anyone how difficult it’s been to locate a headset whose price hasn’t been inflated hundreds-of-dollars by third-party sellers. It’s clear Facebook’s standalone headset was a go-to gift this year, but a recent Q4 2019 earnings call delivered by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg sheds a little more light on Oculus’ success these past few months.

According to the Zuck, nearly $5M worth of VR content was purchased on the Oculus Store on Christmas Day; no doubt due in large part to the influx of new users who had been gifted their first Oculus headsets just that morning.

Image Credit: Oculus, Facebook

“We’ve also been focused on delivering the next computing platform with augmented and virtual reality,” stated Zuckerburg after briefly shining the spotlight on small businesses. “This is the holy grail of social experiences and it’s going to let us build things we’ve only dreamed of for the last 15 years — like letting people interact as if they’re in person together no matter where they are, or letting people live wherever they want and hologram into work so they can access opportunities anywhere and don’t have to move to a city or another country for a job.”

“We hit a real milestone for virtual reality with Quest,” he continues. “Sales are stronger than we expected and people are buying and engaging with more content than we’d expected too. On Christmas day, people bought almost $5 million worth of content in the Oculus Store. That’s an outlier day, but still this is real volume by any measure and it shows the progress this ecosystem is making. The experience also just keeps getting better. Last quarter we shipped hand-tracking, which almost no one thought we’d be able to pull off with the Quest hardware. And we shipped Oculus Link so you can run all your Rift content from your PC on Quest.”

Zuckerburg also took some time to reaffirm the company’s commitment to AR technology as well.

Image Credit: Nielsen Company

“On the AR side, while we’re working on the long term hardware and operating system, it’s worth noting that our Spark AR platform is the most widely used AR platform in the world with hundreds of millions of people interacting with effects every month. Artists are using this to create new face filters and other tools that are going viral across Instagram and Facebook. We’re well positioned here overall and we’re going to keep developing this platform.”

According to a recent SuperData report, Oculus sold over 705K Quest units in 2019, more than both the PC-powered Oculus Rift S and 3DoF standalone Oculus Go combined. Of course, there’s no way to confirm whether these figures are in fact accurate, a fact Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey is quick to point out.

For those interested in learning more about Oculus’ progress during Q4 2019, you can read through the entirety of Zuck’s earnings call here.

Feature Image Credit: Facebook Oculus