Thursday, 20 January, 2022 UTC
Summary
Early signs indicate that Quest 2 had a blowout Q4, most of which came in the gift-heavy holiday period that caps off the quarter. As we’ve examined in the past, Quest 2 is primed for holiday sales due to its aggressive loss-leader pricing that puts Quest 2 in giftable territory.
In addition to Q4 last year (Quest 2’s first holiday period), signals following this year’s holiday period point to a sales surge for the device. As we broke down last week, this included Oculus mobile app downloads, as well as app sales inflections for third-party developers.
Joining that pile of evidence are the latest Oculus app download figures from app analytics firms like Apptopia and Sensor Tower — the focus of this week’s Data Dive. As background, the Oculus mobile app is used to set up and manage Quest 2: a reliable proxy for unit sales.
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Final Tally
So what are the final numbers on Quest 2’s holiday surge? They could be as high as 2.2 million units. This counts the period from Christmas day through last week, as users set up their devices. To put that into perspective, we’ve pegged Q3 sales at about 1.4 million for the entire quarter.
Specifically, Sensor Tower reports that during the week of December 23–29, Oculus app downloads spiked 517 percent from the previous week. In absolute numbers, that comes to 1.5 million installs. In the week that followed, it saw 345,000 downloads, totalling 1.845 million.
Meanwhile, Apptopia’s estimates are a bit higher for roughly the same period. The firm estimates that the Oculus App was downloaded 2.189 million times. Of those installs, 79 percent, or 1.727 million, happened in the U.S. Sensor Tower’s data likewise indicate U.S.-dominant sales.
As for methodology, it’s worth noting that app analytics firms like Sensor Tower and Apptopia use an extrapolation model. They have large device networks, which they use to estimate the full population of app downloads and usage behavior. They’re fairly reliable, given large samples.
Magic Number
Panning back, one thing that’s clear from these figures is that Meta is close to its 10-million lifetime unit sales target (Quest 1 and 2). We recently predicted that this milestone would come in 2022, and now it’s clear it will hit the mark early in the year….if it hasn’t already done so.
More importantly, why is 10 million the magic number? As Mark Zuckerberg explains, this is the critical mass of users that can germinate a robust content ecosystem. It kicks off a virtuous cycle by incentivizing developers to spend time and money developing for a given platform.
Put another way, an eight-figure installed base presents financial incentive for developers to flock to a platform to meet demand. That stimulates greater content libraries that attract more users, which in turn attract more developers, and around we go — a classic flywheel effect.
This process is happening naturally as Meta’s hardware base grows. But it’s also something that it continues to accelerate through heavy investment. Though it could hit the 10-million mark imminently (or has already), many usage and sales milestones still loom in Meta’s future.
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https://medium.com/media/1e1f2ee7654748bb938735cbca6f0fd3/hrefThe Final Numbers on Quest 2’s Happy Holidays was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.