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

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!