VR sales data we can count on – Neil Schneider
[Philip Lelyveld note: this article focuses on VR in Gaming, not the broader uses of VR.]
Oculus and HTC are each recommending an AMD 290 series or Nvidia GTX970 series graphics card or better. In fact, there are already signs that the Oculus SDK will detect if your graphics card isn’t up to spec and their software won’t work for you. So everything that performs less than these GPUs is out of the virtual reality universe — settled.
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For argument’s sake, let’s aggressively predict that by the end of 2016, 7 million high-end GPUs are sold, and this includes the qualified GPUs sold in 2013 and 2014. Factoring in that many gamer PCs use SLI or Crossfire, I estimate there will be three million gaming PCs powerful enough to play in virtual reality.
Whether it’s SLI or Crossfire or single GPU doesn’t matter –three million PCs is the potential universe for modern virtual reality. If an optimistic 10 percent of these PCs own a dedicated virtual reality device, the industry is looking at 300,000 head-mounted displays sold within 12 months from launch.
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Estimate that with nearly 22 percent of the market share, Samsung sells 300 million units a year. 20 percent of these are high-end, so that means Samsung’s Gear VR has a potential reach of 60 million phones. If they can achieve an aggressive 5 percent early adoption rate within 12 months of Gear VR launch, that brings it to about three million units sold. I think that’s very aggressive, but it’s not crazy.
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If Google takes their Cardboard platform seriously, designs their own chips as pseudo-publicized a few weeks ago, and effectively flips the virtual reality switch in all their compliant phones, they have a potential reach of 200 million Android phones each year including Samsung’s.
Combined with their dirt cheap cardboard option and more premium clam-shell virtual reality vendors like ImmersiON-VRelia, they could achieve a 10 percent adoption. So that brings their take to about 20 million Android phones within a twelve month period.
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Console in every way, shape, and form has it made. I estimate that Sony PlayStation 4 will have 35 to 40 forty million units sold by the end of 2015. Thanks to their console’s fixed specification and their head-mounted displays’ committed resolution limit, it’s an easy sell. If there are 35 million PS4’s in the world, and if they could sell the PlayStation VR head-mounted display to 10 percent of them — that’s 3.5 million units sold in the first year with sequential market growth to follow.
The genius of it is that PlayStation is suddenly in the display business as well as the console business. Even if they have a modest success, their hardware consistency makes for a promising future.
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