PlayStation VR has apparently turned out to be more popular than Sony had hoped, as the company has revealed it has sold more than 915,000 units in four months as of February 19. The goal was to hit the one million mark by mid-April.
Sony VP and global head of PR Andrew House said the internal estimates were meant to be conservative. “It’s the classic case in any organization — the guys who are on the front end in sales are getting very excited, very hyped up,” Mr. House said in an interview with The New York Times “You have to temper that with other voices inside the company, myself among them, saying let’s just be a little bit careful.”
House said the popularity has been a pleasant surprise for Sony. “You literally have people lining up outside stores when they know stock is being replenished,” he said, talking about a scene he saw in Japan. Supply is expected to increase in April.
The virtual reality headset and controllers, which launched on October 13, retails for $399, much cheaper than its competition. Oculus sells its unit for $599, while HTC Vive runs $799, and need a high end PC to run. Both have not disclosed unit sales, but research firm SuperData Research estimates 243,000 Rift and 420,000 HTC Vive headsets sold by the end of 2016.
HTC even congratulated Sony on its achievement. “I think it’s a very healthy sign,” Alvin Graylin, President of Vive in China told UploadVR. “I mean at the end of the day, the more VR experiences out there, the more users that are using VR the faster this industry is going to grow. So we’re really happy for Sony, we think they’ve done a really good job.”
Graylin said that the market is slightly different between the two headsets, given one is for PlayStation 4 and the other for PC. The company has no intension of trying to poach users from Sony because it has “a different class of users” and is not HTC’s “target audience.”
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