Facebook says Oculus Quest sales are ‘stronger than expected’

Virtual reality platform Oculus is outperforming Facebook’s expectations, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

He singled out the performance of Oculus Quest, the standalone virtual reality system that runs without a gaming PC, specifically during the company’s fourth quarter earnings results call this week.

“While full augmented reality is still a number of years away, we hit a real milestone for virtual reality with Quest,” Zuckerberg said. “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,” Zuckerberg continued. “Last quarter we shipped handtracking, which almost no one thought was going to be possible with Quest hardware. And we shipped Oculus Link so you can run all your Rift content from your PC on Quest.”

Since November, Quest users have been able to access content designed for the PC-based Oculus Rift headsets by connecting them to a gaming PC via a USB cable and running the Oculus Link software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8eXZco46Q

At the Oculus Connect developer conference in September 2019, Zuckerberg reiterated that Facebook has been selling Quest VR headsets as fast as it can make them and said users had spent over $100 million on content in the Oculus Store to date, with app/game sales accounting for over 20% of the total.

“This is going to be the next computing platform, and it’s only going to get more exciting from here,” he said.

Facebook is currently building a social VR world called Horizon, where users will be able to meet other people and create their own spaces. It’s accepting sign-ups ahead of the launch of a Horizon closed beta in early 2020.

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which is scheduled for release this summer, is being developed by Respawn exclusively for Oculus Rift.