Oculus Go to ship 1.8 million this year - Superdata

Superdata sees a market forming for the Oculus Go stand-alone VR headset. The market intelligence firm's latest quarterly cross-reality report on the VR, AR, and MR scene forecasts 2018 shipments of 1.81 million for the just-launched $200 device.

That would make it the market-leading headset of the year outside of the $20 Google Cardboard shell. Superdata expects the next best performing headset to be the PlayStation VR with 1.47 million sold, followed at a distance by Samsung Gear VR shipments of 590,000.

Superdata is not terribly optimistic about high-end PC-based VR headsets this year, projecting 170,000 HTC Vive headsets to hit the market, along with 120,000 each for Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.

That attitude extends well into the future, as Superdata expects PC-based VR revenues to shrink to half their current size by 2021, with mobile VR falling to less than one-third of the 2018 market. However, Superdata believes those losses will be more than offset by stand-alone VR efforts (growing from $2.1 billion this year to a sector-dominating $14.6 billion in 2021) and console VR (jumping from $766 million to $1.79 billion over the same span). In fact, of the shipment forecasts for specific VR devices, the PSVR is the only one expected to be moving more headsets in 2021 than 2018, jumping to 3.72 million.

Even though Superdata believes the future of VR is bright, it's not quite as bright as previously projected. Since the company's last quarterly update, it has scaled back its VR revenue projections for every year. Where it previously expected the VR market to reach $4.5 billion this year growing to $19 billion in 2021, it is now calling for $3.9 billion in 2018, and $17.7 billion by 2021.