PlayStation has announced that over 3 million PlayStation Virtual Reality headsets have been sold around the world.
Early this morning on Twitter, the PlayStation Europe Twitter account took to the internet to announce the news with a quick thank you. The tweet also included a picture of the PSVR headset being gawked at by those cute, little robots from the Sony first-party game, Astrobot.
While the tweet doesn’t necessarily confirm that PSVR has sold 3 million unit to customers, it’s fair to assume that’s what the tweet is detailing — if that wasn’t the case, the tweet likely would have read, “shipped” instead of “sold.”
On top of this announcement, Sony also announced the top ten best-selling titles for PSVR with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR leading the pack, followed by PlayStation VR Worlds and Rec Room. You can view the full list here. To celebrate, Sony has discounted many VR titles in the Totally Digital Sale going on right now, with discounts for pre-orders on upcoming VR games too.
3 million might come as a surprise to some. We knew that as of December 2017, Sony had sold 2 million units, which means that in less than a year, the company has sold through at least another 1 million. For a console, one million sold in a year this early in an ecosystem’s life is nowhere near lucrative, at least not for giants like Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo, but for a virtual reality unit, one million would appear to be great news. This number is especially surprising because in an investor relations event that took place in December of last year, Sony said that while yes, PSVR’s numbers are continuing to grow, the growth of the VR market overall was “below expectation.”
The numbers of PSVR compared to those of competitors (and competitors is a stretch considering the only VR unit capable of being used with a PlayStation is PSVR) are very telling. Specifically, the PSVR is the most successful VR unit on the market. According to Statista, a statistics website that pulls its data from more than 22,000 different sources, PSVR is selling almost two-to-one over its closest competitor, the Oculus Rift VR headset. Specifically, Statista shows that PSVR has sold 2.7 million units — it’s likely their data is soon to be updated now that Sony has announced PSVR has hit 3 million — with Oculus only selling 1.5 million. The third big-hitter, HTC Vive, has only sold 1.1 million, according to Statista’s numbers.
With Sony’s first-party studios seemingly backing off of the virtual reality market for now — we know what most of the studios are working on and much of it isn’t VR — only time will tell how this market will continue to shake out. Are first-party games necessary to keep PSVR afloat or do the other titles available on the system get the job done? For now, only time will tell.
About the author
