Andrew House Reveals That Over 915,000 PSVR Headsets Have Been Sold

Sony’s PSVR headset is still facing scarcity in quite a few places, and there were questions on whether this was due to low supply or high demand for Sony’s latest platform. Well it appears Sony wasn’t quite ready for the demand of the market as Andrew House has revealed to The New York Times that as of February 19th over 915,000 PSVR headsets had been sold worldwide. The company has internal targets of having sold one million headsets by mid-April.

Apparently Andrew House was on the side of caution before launch and advised Sony make fewer headsets before launch in case sales weren’t as high as hoped. In the interview with The New York Times he said he was hoping to keep expectations in check.

“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. You have to temper that with other voices inside the company, myself among them, saying let’s just be a little bit careful.”

Neither Oculus or HTC have revealed solid sales figures for the Rift or Vive, but according to The New York Times Sony is leading the VR headset market by a large margin. They use data by SuperData Research which has figures of 420,000 Vives sold, and 243,000 Rifts sold by the end of 2016.

Source: The New York Times

Written by
From the heady days of the Mega Drive up until the modern day gaming has been my main hobby. I'll give almost any game a go.

17 Comments

  1. That’s good to hear but in all fairness, no point in owning the VR now at the moment. It’s gathering dust & resident evil was too creepy with it on to play

    • I agree with Resident Evil. It’s almost too good at being scary, means I love it but can’t play it.

  2. Good news for Sony, but it’s always the second 6 months that are critical to its success, just look at Vita. Decent initial sales that dried up after it got no support.

  3. Guess they got fed up waiting to announce a million sales then.

  4. I can’t believe they were cautious when it came to production figures. They research and invest a huge amount in a product, they’re not going to be flimsy and say we’ll ride with whatever the results are despite the investment. There are expectations that the device will return so much in a set life cycle, either through raw sales or promotion of software/console sales.

    I tend to think they were just unprepared for demand. Either that or House is telling the truth, but if Sony doesn’t have the boldness and faith in the device, it hardly shouts confidence or commitment to the product.

    • He’s obviously happy talking about it with hindsight on his side.

      When I was studying Product Design, it was fascinating to know that only one out of every seven products (on average across all products) actually make it to manufacture – let alone become some sort of relative success.

      There’ll be hits and misses and at least the PSVR is out of the blocks with a decent start. It’ll be interesting to see how the VR niche of gaming maintains momentum over the next six months.

    • I can’t believe you can’t believe this. It’s always easy to know better – afterwards.

      Other companies in the gaming market went bankrupt partly because of hardware overproduction, e.g. THQ with their drawing tablets nobody wanted. It’s damn expensive. I think Sony did quite well, as PSVR shortage in my opinion is more of a rumour than a fact.

  5. I’m glad it’s selling well as it’s a great bit of kit. Two of my favourite PS4 games of all time are DriveClub VR and Dirt Rally VR, they’re everything I wanted VR to be when it was first mentioned all those years ago.

  6. That’s more than I was expecting it to have sold by now. But it’s still less than 2% of PS4s attached to one.

    And at the rate it’s selling, it’ll struggle to get to 2m by the end of the year. By which point the PS4 sales will be quite possibly be 60m+, probably closer to 70m. So still around 1.5 to 3% of PS4s will have a PSVR.

    Which doesn’t look good for software after the initial batch. Or we’ll see more games supporting but not requiring it, which seems to be what quite a few of them really should have done in the first place.

    • 1m sales is still a million sales, percentages aren’t important. What does matter is that this has become the leading VR platform, eclipsing ocolus and vive sales combined by a factor of 2 in a quarter of the time.

      If you are targeting VR, then PSVR is where the users, and growth are, it’s got by far the lowest entry cost (especially if you are one of the 60m+ user base)

  7. I’ll pick one up when the price drops. :)

  8. Their caution is understandable when you look at the sales figures for the others, especially the Rift. Impressive stuff but they’ll have competition in the console market when Scorpio launches with Rift support and possibly Microsoft’s own cheaper headsets as an option.

  9. Impressive! But the games drought it very worrying. I’m hoping I can get on board the VR train after the summer but if there isn’t a good number of VR game announcements at E3 I’ll reconsider. I’m hopefully though, come on Sony, you can do it!

  10. House….roadhouse.

Comments are now closed for this post.