House: PSVR has sold 915,000 units
Executive tried too hard to cool sales expectations within Sony, he says
Sony executive Andrew House has finally publicly revealed the sales figures for PSVR, telling the New York Times that the device had sold 915,000 units as of February 20 - four months after release.
In fact, House told the paper that he had cautioned Sony's internal teams to lower expectations for sales of the hardware, telling sales staff that their estimates were over-optimistic. After internal consultation, sales expectations were set to a million units after six months, a figure which should easily be eclipsed.
"It's the classic case in any organization - the guys who are on the front end in sales are getting very excited, very hyped up," House told the NYT. "You have to temper that with other voices inside the company, myself among them, saying let's just be a little bit careful."
Sony's Richard Marks echoed the sentiment, telling the NYT that "We were expecting it to be a lot smaller than it has turned out to be."
House also told the paper that production should step up soon, increasing availability of the HMD by April. He said he would be "Very happy" if a high single-digit number of PS4 owners ended up being PSVR players. With 53 million of the consoles in homes around the world, 5 million PlayStation VR headsets seems to be the target before the end of the console generation.
As well as the sales figure and implied target projections, House revealed that the release of Capcom's Resident Evil 7 has doubled the amount of time which PSVR owners spend using the device, although he didn't go into details on how long an average user spent in VR. As the most high-profile and fully-formed game compatible with PSVR, Resident Evil 7 has seen high engagement, with Capcom reporting that around 10% of buyers had played the game with the headset.