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Oculus Rift pre-order numbers total (theory)

Man

Member
Some info for sales-age:
1fpbkqP.jpg
Sticker price: $599

This is theoretical (please post own estimates as you have them).

The lowest order number we know of is: 613 0000 21 XXXXX.

Looking at this chart you can see how these orders are spread w/shipping estimates:

Now, it seems like Oculus started just a day or two ago to add Kickstarter backers to the end of the order list. As you know, all KS backers whom pledged for the full Oculus DK1 kit ($300+) will receive a free consumer unit. Some of the pledges covered multiple DK1's and it might be possible that these will be receiving multiple consumer units (but they are the minority). Having counted up the KS backer campaign numbers earlier there will be around ~6500-7000 free units given out.
(sidenote: KS backers won't have to wait until all prior order are fulfilled before theirs are shipped)

So, after KS backers being appended yesterday we are up to order number 613 0000 80 XXXXX.
I'm an 80 according to that chart unless I'm looking at the order number wrong.
I haven't seen a higher order number at this time. The lowest order number for a KS backer I've seen is 613 0000 67 XXXXX (updated, thanks kingschiebi) though it might be even lower. It seems like one can assume that XXXXX doesn't represent ..00000 additional units but rather ..000 (unless for some magical reason they had 1.3 million additional pre-orders in the last 24 hours and having 6+ million in pre-orders total...).
(Edit: seems like XXXXX follows some algorithm so we cannot base qty directly from that)

Also, an order made by another NeoGAF user today has estimated shipping time set to July:
Well, I just preordered the Rift. Expected shipping is July 2016.

It's unsure why the lowest number starts at ..21.. . Obfuscation? Developer orders / hands-out prior? Anyhow, what we are concerned about is consumer success. (Edit: removed total calc, follow discussions below)

The combined amount of Oculus DK1 and DK2 units sold between summer 2012 (Kickstarter) and summer 2015 (DK2 ending sales) were 175 000 units (proof 1, proof 2). These were free to purchase for the public at large during their lifespan but didn't receive any direct marketing and were always marked as developer units. Price ranged from $299 to $349. Also they didn't have direct competition like the HTC Vive (launching simultaneously) and the upcoming PSVR.
 

rickyson1

Member
so looking at that chart my 38 would presumably be around 50/50 may/june at this point? don't have any sort of estimates on my page
 

UnrealEck

Member
This. To be backordered until July they must have ~400-450K preorders.

That's a lot of headsets even though they require a fairly high end PC. Put that together with Vive and we're probably seeing pretty decent numbers for VR's launch which will only increase a fair amount with new hardware coming out as well as PSVR launching in October.
181c3dd532c320245ba983019b12d831.360x270x36.gif
 
Well, if you are going to theorize, you missed the biggest hint they've given until now.

Two days ago Palmer posted on Reddit how losing 50k units would mean 2 week less of preorders in July:

I'd wager Oculus has lost 50k+ sales from this minimum
Oh no, we might be sold out till late July instead of sold out to mid July!

So, in the case they have linear manufacturing capacity, that would mean 350K units sold (50K per 2 weeks).

Of course, numbers could vary. For example, surely they had a bigger amount of Rifts manufactured in the last months, say 75K units, and onwards they plan to make in April and May 15K per week, and in June and July they should ramp up production to cover retail with 25K per week.
Adding up: 75K on release day + 60k April + 60k May + 100k June + 50k in first half of July = 345K units. Totally made up stuff, who knows the ratio between already manufactured units and planned to manufacture, and who knows if the manufactured number of units per week is going to be static or it will increase.

edit: but Palmer numbers could include units sold not to consumers (preorders) but units assigned to retail, they said starting late April they would start selling too on shops.
 

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
Seeing how Palmer's comment is meant to be sarcastic, I wouldn't take it as it is, as these kind of comments tend to be a bit on the exaggeration side.
 

artsi

Member
My number that I pulled from my ass is around 300 - 400K.

EDIT: I think the XXXXX part is simply random, and nothing can be deduced from that number.
 

Lister

Banned
That's a lot of headsets even though they require a fairly high end PC. Put that together with Vive and we're probably seeing pretty decent numbers for VR's launch which will only increase a fair amount with new hardware coming out as well as PSVR launching in October.
181c3dd532c320245ba983019b12d831.360x270x36.gif

Well, the number of PC gamers more or less meeeting those high end specs are about 1/2 of the entire PS4 install base. That's not a small number. And those people are a hell of a lot more likely to want to invest $600 on a VR headset than your average console gamer is on a $450 one.
 

cheezcake

Member
Well, if you are going to theorize, you missed the biggest hint they've given until now.

Two days ago Palmer posted on Reddit how losing 50k units would mean 2 week less of preorders in July:



So, in the case they have linear manufacturing capacity, that would mean 350K units sold (50K per 2 weeks).

Of course, numbers could vary. For example, surely they had a bigger amount of Rifts manufactured in the last months, say 75K units, and onwards they plan to make in April and May 15K per week, and in June and July they should ramp up production to cover retail with 25K per week.
Adding up: 75K on release day + 60k April + 60k May + 100k June + 50k in first half of July = 345K units. Totally made up stuff, who knows the ratio between already manufactured units and planned to manufacture, and who knows if the manufactured number of units per week is going to be static or it will increase.

edit: but Palmer numbers could include units sold not to consumers (preorders) but units assigned to retail, they said starting late April they would start selling too on shops.

While I don't think you can extrapolate any meaningful numbers from this statement it pretty much rules out the OP estimate of 60K, that is way too low.
 
Well, the number of PC gamers more or less meeeting those high end specs are about 1/2 of the entire PS4 install base. That's not a small number. And those people are a hell of a lot more likely to want to invest $600 on a VR headset than your average console gamer is on a $450 one.
Wha? Where are you getting that number? The percentage of Steam users with GTX 970 or higher at the end of February was 6.25% according to their official hardware survey, out of a total of 165 million active Steam users (Steamspy), which means just over 10 million PC gamers are probably roughly meeting the required specs. PS4 has sold 35 million units as of January (International Business Times). So it's less than 1/3 of the entire PS4 install base.
 
Aren't they shipping to retail? Manufacture rates should be a lot higher than preorder rates if they have retail orders to honour.
6-8M sounds very high but 600k seems plausible, and retail orders could be mixed in with those numbers couldn't they?
 

QaaQer

Member
Interesting theory.

We really have no way of knowing what the sell through to consumers is. Apparently, manufacturing these things isn't as easy as people think. According to Shu, they delayed launch until the fall because of the difficulty in ramping up production as they wanted a proper launch with sufficient numbers.
 
I read the same GAF comment about someone's recent pre-order arriving in July. The weird thing is, I ordered on January 15, and got the same estimated release date of July. This could point to a few possible explanations:

a) production is slated to ramp up massively in/just before July;
b) so many people have cancelled their pre-orders since January that the relative number of pre-orders since then have just barely kept pace;
c) very few people have pre-ordered a Rift since mid-January;
d) the queue is actually longer than July but Oculus doesn't want to give out estimated dates later than July because they're too vague/too off-putting to customers.

I have zero insight into which of these scenarios is real, if any (or if there's some other explanation I haven't thought of).
 

Bunta

Fujiwara Tofu Shop
I read the same GAF comment about someone's recent pre-order arriving in July. The weird thing is, I ordered on January 15, and got the same estimated release date of July. This could point to a few possible explanations:

a) production is slated to ramp up massively in/just before July;
b) so many people have cancelled their pre-orders since January that the relative number of pre-orders since then have just barely kept pace;
c) very few people have pre-ordered a Rift since mid-January;
d) the queue is actually longer than July but Oculus doesn't want to give out estimated dates later than July because they're too vague/too off-putting to customers.

I have zero insight into which of these scenarios is real, if any (or if there's some other explanation I haven't thought of).
Huh, that's interesting. Hopefully we start finding out soon just how long it takes to start manufacturing/shipping the rest of the orders.
 

Kusagari

Member
Yeah, it's pretty crazy that people that ordered day 1 got May/June release dates while ordering now still gives you a July one.

So either they expect production to ramp up incredibly around then or the thing basically died off in terms of preorders after the first day.
 
Yeah, it's pretty crazy that people that ordered day 1 got May/June release dates while ordering now still gives you a July one.

So either they expect production to ramp up incredibly around then or the thing basically died off in terms of preorders after the first day.

This. the people that really wanted to take the leap did it immediately.
 
I'm going to restate my tinfoil hat theory that the grand majority of preorders will ship in April-May. They only created this artificial backer release of the 28th to beat Vive units to market "officially". I don't think even preorder rifts are anywhere near March release and shipment dates. It also fits the pattern of Oculus using tiny victories to claim they did something.

Room scale!? We have a prototype! We did it first!
First release!? It was us! we sent kickstarters out!
We already released on two platforms! GearVR has nothing to do with us!
 

rickyson1

Member
I read the same GAF comment about someone's recent pre-order arriving in July. The weird thing is, I ordered on January 15, and got the same estimated release date of July. This could point to a few possible explanations:

a) production is slated to ramp up massively in/just before July;
b) so many people have cancelled their pre-orders since January that the relative number of pre-orders since then have just barely kept pace;
c) very few people have pre-ordered a Rift since mid-January;
d) the queue is actually longer than July but Oculus doesn't want to give out estimated dates later than July because they're too vague/too off-putting to customers.

I have zero insight into which of these scenarios is real, if any (or if there's some other explanation I haven't thought of).

how does retail work? do they have a certain amount they need to send out or can they choose to send less out at the last minute?

(meaning could they be ramping up production for retail with the intention of just sending less of them out to use some of them for pre-orders if need be?)
 

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
Coming back to this thread and seeing how the "launch" goes, I think the "they've been manufacturing since October" is just not true. They've been barely able to produce some thousands (maybe) to send to the a part of the backers on 28th of March as promised. Not even all the backers have gotten a delivery notice, so clearly they're able to produce much less than estimated in this thread.

Also the "50000 means two weeks" seems to be another Palmer like "truth", because it has been more than one "two weeks" since preorders started and that production would have covered not only the backers but probably a lot of the March and April pre-orders too.
 
"Coming back to this thread and seeing how the "launch" goes, I think the "they've been manufacturing since October" is just not true. They've been barely able to produce some thousands (maybe) to send to the a part of the backers on 28th of March as promised. Not even all the backers have gotten a delivery notice, so clearly they're able to produce much less than estimated in this thread. "

We have no idea whether the hold up with shipping is a matter of not having enough units produced or whether it's some other kind of logistics issue. That said, I don't think you can really draw the conclusion that the problem is not having enough units manufactured.
 
"Coming back to this thread and seeing how the "launch" goes, I think the "they've been manufacturing since October" is just not true. They've been barely able to produce some thousands (maybe) to send to the a part of the backers on 28th of March as promised. Not even all the backers have gotten a delivery notice, so clearly they're able to produce much less than estimated in this thread. "

We have no idea whether the hold up with shipping is a matter of not having enough units produced or whether it's some other kind of logistics issue.

It could also be the latter. When they announced who is handling the shipping, a lot of people on reddit said that this was a bad choice.
 

KingSnake

The Birthday Skeleton
"Coming back to this thread and seeing how the "launch" goes, I think the "they've been manufacturing since October" is just not true. They've been barely able to produce some thousands (maybe) to send to the a part of the backers on 28th of March as promised. Not even all the backers have gotten a delivery notice, so clearly they're able to produce much less than estimated in this thread. "

We have no idea whether the hold up with shipping is a matter of not having enough units produced or whether it's some other kind of logistics issue. That said, I don't think you can really draw the conclusion that the problem is not having enough units manufactured.

That's true. A logistic problem could be the cause, but it would a bit strange to be even for the backers (because that was a known quantity, assuming they were surprised by the large number of pre-orders). A logistic problem that would suddenly keep some tens of thousands of products in the warehouses sounds like a huge pain in the ass. But you're right it's a possibility.
 

shandy706

Member
Is there not an actual total/pre-order guesstimate in the OP or am I completely blind?


Edit* If I have to do match to figure it out, I quit! LOL

Work day has been too long for that.
 

Man

Member
It was just a bit too vague so I edited out any conclusions.

Oculus have been talking (lots of talking) about production but they are fumbling out the gates and not many are sitting on devices currently. Also the XXXXX order foundation is (not very surprisingly) obfuscated so I guess we have to wait for a bit more data.
Developer leaks or online leaderboards in games can be pin-pointers potentially.
 
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