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Meta’s New XR Roadmap Confirms Quest 2 Install Base Under 20 Million — But Little Mention of the Metaverse (Again)

Meta XR plans no Metaverse

Great scoop from The Verge’s Alex Heath, laying out Meta’s new XR roadmap, with lots of interesting nuggets on new VR headsets and also AR glasses. Most relevant to what I’ve been writing about recently, it confirms my forecast last month, that Quest 2’s install base is still below 20 million:

With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta’s flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don’t fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. Meta has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets to date, Mark Rabkin, the company’s vice president for VR, told employees during the presentation.

On February 3, I put the Quest 2’s install base closer to 18 million:

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Assuming that $727M is mostly from Quest 2 sales (now at $399), that comes out to about 1,800,000 units. That’s the high end. Factoring in revenue from app sales etc., let’s call that 1.5 to 1.8 million Quest 2 units sold during the Q4 2022 holiday season. 

That’s quite a dip in sales! When it sold at $299 over the 2021 holidays, it sold around 2.9 million units (give or take). I’m not surprised, though; increasing the MSRP on an appliance even though it hasn’t fundamentally improved is, well, bonkers.

Now let’s look at the total Quest 2 install base:

Last October, the New York Times estimated Quest 2’s install base was 15 million. (That’s in line with my own estimates earlier in 2022.)

So that brings us to Quest 2 install base of 16.5 million-17.8 million.

The first Quest headset (now discontinued) sold around 2 million, so that’s in line with Rabkin’s “nearly 20 million Quest headsets to date” remark. So that small mystery is solved. But it also deepens the mystery of why Meta would want to keep making even more VR headsets when their existing install base is still so small.

Also another mystery is still deepened: “The Metaverse” was apparently not mentioned in this roadmap, not even once, nor even Horizon Worlds, not even as a software platform for all this XR hardware they’re making. Which is once again in line with Meta’s “vision for the future” announcement that was also scant on the Metaverse. (The thing that Zuckerberg once said he was so passionate about making, he even changed the name of his company.)

Can we finally say for sure that Meta is no longer in the metaverse industry? Meta itself sure seems to think so!

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One response to “Meta’s New XR Roadmap Confirms Quest 2 Install Base Under 20 Million — But Little Mention of the Metaverse (Again)”

  1. Martin K. Avatar
    Martin K.

    […] the mystery of why Meta would want to keep making even more VR headsets when their existing install base is still so small.
    Easy: They cannot make the AR glasses that they want to make, so they make mixed-reality(!) VR headsets, because they need to figure out what people would want to look at with AR glasses (apart from ads). The idea being to establish the infrastructure for mixed-reality content early on and then use that very same infrastructure when AR glasses become possible.
    It’s the same strategy that Apple is following.
    Can we finally say for sure that Meta is no longer in the metaverse industry?
    I mean, of course, you can define “metaverse industry” in a way that excludes Meta, and then spend your time arguing why that is the correct way of defining “metaverse industry”. Have fun with that.
    Meta itself sure seems to think so!
    I doubt that. They understand that the hype about the m-word is over and users associate it increasingly with failed web3 enterprises and cybersickness, so they don’t use it externally. I’m sure that internally, they still use it, in a sense that they have discussed a while ago: a navigable collection of XR experiences, i.e. users hop alone or in a party of users between virtual worlds offered by apps or users spawn virtual objects offered by those apps.

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