SuperData Research, a market-intelligence firm, has shared some of its estimated sales numbers for VR hardware. It claims that Samsung’s Gear VR, which it built in cooperation with Facebook’s Oculus VR, is the best-selling headset by a ratio of more than 2-to-1. Samsung sold 782,000 headsets to consumers in the first quarter.
Here’s a breakdown of the sales in Q1 by head-mounted display, according to SuperData:
Gear VR: 782,000
PlayStation VR: 375,000
Google Daydream: 170,000
HTC Vive: 95,000
Oculus Rift: 64,000
These numbers make a lot of sense based on price and availability. Gear VR is the headset that works with Samsung’s Galaxy phones, which are the best-selling Android devices by far. Gear VR is also $100, but Samsung often gives them away to its customers. Google Daydream is similar, but Google is selling its smartphone headset to a smaller number of Google Pixel owners.
PlayStation VR is the head-mounted display that works with the PlayStation 4, which is the best-selling console on the market. Sony has sold more than 53.4 million systems since 2013, and so that’s a huge audience of content-hungry consumers. Some of them are willing to spend $500 to get a PSVR add-on.
As for the PC solutions, Vive is outselling the Rift. That’s likely because HTC’s and Valve’s VR system is a bit better at room-scale games, and people who want to spend hundreds of dollars on a gaming PC and then several hundred more on VR goggles are likely willing to spend a little bit more to go with the Vive over the Rift.