As some may scold virtual reality technology for its obvious flaws, it continues to gain popularity. Yes, VR is not yet devoid of serious technical flaws like low resolution displays, a conductive connection with the signal source, as well as “the effect of motion sickness”, which causes nausea in some users. Nevertheless, sales statistics VR headsets tells us that this technology has a great and bright future.
Analytical company Canalys released its report about sales of VR headsets from major manufacturers for the third quarter of 2017. And these data give us confidence that virtual reality is steadily gaining momentum and an increasing number of people are hesitant to buy a strange device that moves them inside video games or 360-degree videos. The main producers of VR-helmets in just three months managed to implement a little more than 1 million such devices. You may think that this is a small number, but recall that last year the situation with sales was very depressing.
The heads of three leaders of the Japanese company Sony. She was able to realize 490 000 PlayStation VR helmets. Given that last week during “Black Friday,” the cost of a headset Sony was reduced almost two times, you can mentally add on to this a couple of hundred thousand devices. While these data have not yet been made public. All in all, Sony with its headset managed to grab 49% of the market, which is a very good indicator. Second place with 21% and 210,000 sold headsets is the Oculus. And third, as you might have already guessed, with 14% lagging HTC with 160 000 sold headset Vive.
In General, the three leaders is today, 86% of the market. The remaining 14% are distributed among the players such as Google, Samsung, Lenovo and others. Their sets, unfortunately manufacturers are not able to compete with a wide range of games and applications, which can boast Sony, Oculus and Samsung. Sony is so good “shot” to their PlayStation VR that instantly grabbed 80% of the market Japan. And to stop the Japanese are not going: they regularly release bundles helmet, putting back games like Gran Turismo Sport or Skyrim VR.
Analysts believe that virtual reality in the next few years waiting for an unprecedented rise. Because of these devices can be used not only in the gaming industry, but also in industry, health, education and other industries. Given that Microsoft not long ago created open Windows platform, Mixed Reality, on the market in the near future will flood the VR headsets from different manufacturers. The wait is very long.
For the third quarter of 2017, it sold over a million VR headsets
Sergey Grey