It’s only been a day since Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) launched the highly anticipated PlayStation VR on the world and so far things seem to be going well. While its too early to say how successful the launch has been one of the company’s heads has indicated sales are high.
In an interview with CNBC SIE’s Global Head of Sales and Marketing, Jim Ryan has commented in an interview that: “We know from the data we have from pre-orders that the interest we have is significant,” before adding that sales should be in: “many hundreds of thousands”.
PlayStation VR is one of the most promising entries into the virtual reality (VR) market due to several factors. It provides a higher quality experience than mobile VR, the PlayStation 4 install base is over 40 million with the current launch of the Slim version dropping the standard console even lower, and the PlayStation VR headset is significantly cheaper than its PC-based rivals, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
Even though the Oculus Rift launched at the end of March and HTC Vive a few days later in April, neither company has released concrete sales figures for the headsets, to give an indication on how big the higher-end VR market is and its growth. SIE will likely in time buck this trend and reveal sales figures, if it does it won’t be until next year.
But for success SIE also needs to avoid the trap both of its rivals fell into at launch, not having enough headsets to fulfil pre-orders taken months before hand. Ryan addresses this by saying: “We know that the replenishment cycle is a good one, production is going exactly as we anticipated. We have made decisions to further increase capacity at the back end of 2016 and into 2017, so there are going to be a lot of PlayStation VRs around the world, whether that’s enough to satisfy the demands of the market, we’ll see.”
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