Last week, Digital Trends reported a sharp decline in VR sales numbers including a sharp decline for HTC’s Vive headsets. To address these concerns, HTC has released a statement including some analytics to prove that VR and their Vive headsets are still on the rise.
“Digital Trends wrote a report last week which dove into third-party Amazon data to show a steep drop in VIVE sales. This has been the case of most of the dread and panic pervading the internet about VR. It’s also not the whole story,” said HTC on their blog post.
“There’s a reason for this decline. VIVE has paced at its highest sales velocity of all time, for weeks on end, and we sold out. For a consumer electronic product in its third calendar year, this continued trajectory is nearly unheard of. Don’t worry, though: we are ramping up production of the original VIVE and units will continue to roll out to online and retail over the coming weeks.”
HTC went on to share data collected by International Data Corporation (IDC) on the revenue market share for Q1 of 2018.
“That is why we’re happy to see intelligence firms like International Data Corporation (IDC) get it right. They analyzed VR revenue share and show VIVE as the leader in the space, which means our investments are paying off for consumers and businesses. It means customers have more to do with their VR headsets and it means businesses see a path toward earning money themselves. It’s exactly where we want to be.”
According to the collected analytics, HTC Vive owned 35.7% share of the revenue market in VR headsets in Q1 of 2018. Second was Samsung with Oculus lagging behind.
HTC went on to state that “VIVE offers the best in premium VR, whether PC-based or Stand-alone.” They also shared numbers in the Chinese market where the Vive Focus leads the way in the Standalone headsets category.
This report was generated by Canalys for Q1 of 2018. What are your thoughts about the HTC Vive compared to other competitors such as the Oculus Rift?
The digital trends article about the “VR is in a tailspin” was written by an idiot. He’s anti-VR and that becomes very clear as you read through his statements…
“When the PlayStation VR came out, I scrambled to get one into my house. I ate up its games, burning through VR Worlds, goofing off in PSVR Playroom, and encouraging friends and family to give it a spin. They all had the same CNN-esque reaction. “Wow!”
But then, 30 minutes later, they wanted the thing off their heads for a return to reality. Not a single one of my friends or family members went on to buy a VR unit of their own. In fact, not one of them has asked to give the PSVR another try when they come over.”
I’m not sure being anti-VR means he’s wrong.
Being anti-vr means he has a distorted view of VR. He’s totally ignorant of vr trends and he uses the most facile personal argument to try and persuade everyone vr is dead. That speech about none of his friends wanting to use VR after trying it briefly. The guy is an absolute moron.
Respectfully, you sound like a bit of a vr evangelist. If you look beyond your bubble, I think you’ll discover that beyond a few mind blowing minutes at a demo booth at Walmart, people dont consider it a compelling product/platform, and who can blame them considering the totally stagnant development curve. VivePro was an absolute and total joke. For a Vive rep to say ‘our numbers are flatlining because we sold out of our stock’ is code for HTC doesnt see any point in investing in the current generation hardware. And they are right not to, for exactly the reason the author gave; very, very, very few people are willing to spend $800 on a video card and another $800 on headset/controllers because between the lack of compelling A-level content and the absolutely terrible image quality and the fact that the headsets are straight up uncomfortable, people are hard passing. It’s just statistical fact, not opinion.
Tried replying to this 4 times but the text gets checked by admin and then disappears.
“What are your thoughts about the HTC Vive compared to other competitors such as the Oculus Rift?”
AKA: “hey guys, get in a big argument in the comments!”
No thank you.
I am curious how IDC measures revenue though. Is this hardware revenue? (Vive, being more costly and with higher-priced Vive Pro, Focus, and business products will clearly make more gross revenue than lower-priced Rift and Go, let alone Samsung with its $99 GearVR price point). Does this include software revenue? If so, where is Valve? If not, then how is hardware revenue meaningful when Oculus sells at cost to generate software sales in its store?
Given all the above, saying “Samsung and Oculus lag behind” is silly and probably not representative of any actual market metric that matters.