2016 became a very significant year for virtual reality because Oculus, Facebook and HTC released their VR headsets. Besides, Google launched their own headset Daydream View along with the new VR platform Daydream. However, for a long time, the exact amount of sold headsets and total market revenue were unknown. But the research company SuperData Research finally published these results.
In fact, they were quite surprising. According to this statistics report, the leader of the VR market was Samsung. The Korean company took almost 75% of all sold devices (4.51 million items). The second place was taken by Sony with their Playstation VR. Other notable brand names on the list include HTC Vive, Google Daydream View and Oculus Rift. Overall, 6.3 million VR headsets were sold during 2016.
Despite the total dominance of mobile VR headsets, the PC market was the most profitable. The headsets that work with computers brought $718 mill. of revenue. Further down the list we can see mobile headsets ($687 mill.) and consoles ($411 mill.). The total revenue of this market was $1.8 bill. It’s safe to say that VR was one of the main reasons of 2016 but we can expect an even more rapid development of this industry in 2017.
