Virtual reality – is the honeymoon period over?

Sales of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have ground to a halt, according to the latest figures, despite the end of earlier stock problems.

At the beginning the year it was all anyone could talk about, but almost as soon as the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift headsets were released it quickly became obvious that they didn’t necessarily have the mass market appeal some assumed.

With the Oculus Rift priced at £550 and the HTC Vive at £800, the price is obviously the main problem, with a Steam survey showing that only 0.18% of users own an HTC Vive and only 0.10% have an Oculus Rift.



More worryingly, HTC Vive sales grew only 0.3% in July and were completely flat in August. Oculus Rift sales grew by the same amount in July and just 0.1% in August.


Although both headsets suffered severe stock restrictions when they launched, by July these problems had been resolved and they are now freely available from ordinary retailers in the US. Although the Oculus Rift doesn’t officially launch here until September 20.

The obvious conclusion is that everyone that wanted one straight away – the early adopters – has already got one, and interest from other customers is minimal. Which won’t have been helped by the lack of prominent new games in the meantime.

All this comes a day before Sony is expected to announce the new PlayStation Neo console, a more powerful, and presumably more expensive, version of the PlayStation 4 that is specifically designed with the PlayStation VR headset in mind.

PlayStation VR launches on October 13 for £350, and has significant software support from the rest of the games industry. But these latest figures show the sheer size of the task ahead of it, if it is to make VR mainstream.

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