Thanks to the Meta Quest 2, the AR and VR headset market (collectively known as XR) continues to grow by leaps and bounds. According to IDC, Meta (Facebook)’s flagship VR headset sold 8.7 million units in 2021, with half of those sold during the Christmas holiday season in the fourth quarter. Overall, the Quest 2 accounted for 78% of all XR headset shipments last year.
According to IDC statistics, the total shipments of XR headsets in 2021 will be 11.2 million units, which is the largest shipment growth since the first-generation VR products Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PSVR debuted in 2016. Compared with the previous year, it increased by 92.1%.
The remaining market share is divided among several different companies, including DPVR (which mainly sells VR to commercial customers) at 5.1% and Pico (held by TikTok parent company ByteDance) at 4.5%. Valve, Sony and other smaller companies collectively account for 12.4%.
This means that standalone headsets that don’t require users to connect to a PC or console dominated the XR market share last year, and we saw a similar statistical jump in numbers when the first-generation Oculus Quest launched. Without Quest, it would have been a negative year for the VR industry as a whole.
DICE expects that XR headsets will continue to grow in the next few years. By 2026, XR headset shipments are expected to reach 50 million units, of which 30 million are gaming products and 20 million are commercial.