Meta’s This fall 2022 earnings report was earlier this week, with income from Actuality Labs, its XR/metaverse division, bringing in $727 million — down from $877 million in This fall 2021.
So now it is time to play everybody’s favourite guesstimating recreation: What number of Quest 2’s had been bought, and what is the complete set up base?
Assuming that $727M is generally from Quest 2 gross sales (now at $399), that comes out to about 1,800,000 items. That is the excessive finish. Factoring in income from app gross sales and so on., let’s name that 1.5 to 1.8 million Quest 2 items bought through the This fall 2022 vacation season.
That is fairly a dip in gross sales! When it bought at $299 over the 2021 holidays, it bought round 2.9 million items (give or take). I am not stunned, although; rising the MSRP on an equipment regardless that it hasn’t essentially improved is, properly, bonkers.
Now let’s take a look at the whole Quest 2 set up base:
Final October, the New York Instances estimated Quest 2’s set up base was 15 million. (That is consistent with my very own estimates earlier in 2022.)
In order that brings us to Quest 2 set up base of 16.5 million-17.8 million.
Undoubtedly beneath 18 million, we are able to safely say.
The deep irony: Meta raised the value of Quest 2 as a result of (as Carmack overtly said final 12 months), too many Quest 2 customers had been principally spending their time in free-to-play metaverse platforms VRChat and Rec Room:
Now in fact, worth factors results in the purpose concerning the Quest 2 worth improve, which is clearly tremendous unpopular and there is not any query that it is bizarre to have a headset or have a shopper system go up in worth later. However… the dynamics of subsidizing {hardware} is tremendous widespread on all of the consoles, and it is simply type of the way in which loads of these closed ecosystems are likely to work… you promote the system at a loss and also you make it up on the software program that you just wind up promoting.
However that winds up having a bunch of perverse incentives for common person worth. When you’ve a number of the hottest apps on Quest are free apps, VRChat and Rec Room, that we get no income from in any respect, and whereas they’re sitting there on the prime of our rating listing in lots of circumstances, there’s there’s not loads of inner push for that.
In different phrases, due to heavy competitors by metaverse platforms, shopper development of Meta’s VR {hardware} line is slowing.
Picture through Meta.
