VR as an industry is not quite as mysterious as it used to be. It was not too long ago that the most impressive piece of VR tech was about 80 percent duct tape and 20 percent hope.
In the past two year’s, however, a flurry of announcements, acquisitions and partnerships have elevated VR from a hobbyist’s passion into a juggernaut scene worthy of attention from serious financial analysts. As more and more data points (a price here, a release announcement there) trickle out, these analysts are factoring them together to create a forecast for VR’s future revenue potential. One of these group’s, Super Data Research, is among the first to add two major revelations from MWC 2016 – the HTC Vive’s price and LG’s foray into the mobile VR space – into that equation.
Factoring Vive’s price into the mix, the firm estimated that PC VR tech alone – including all hardware, software, and peripherals – will be a $1.6 billion industry by the end of 2016. Let me be clear about that: this firm believes VR will be an over $1 billion dollar industry in a year that will be one fourth over before the first major headset even begins to release. From there Super Data sees PC VR revenue scaling up fairly steadily year over year to $5.1 billion dollars by 2019.
MWC brought significant announcements for the mobile VR space as well. LG’s introduction of the 360 VR headset, and Samsung’s aggressive pushes to get more Gear VRs into the wild, both impacted the revenue forecasts for mobile VR.
“LG needs to have a competitive edge and even though Samsung beat them to the punch with VR, if they hadn’t moved forward with an HMD they would have been grossly behind. This, at least, keeps them in the running, but we have yet to really see how much power they are bringing to the table.
“We have our own regional forecasts of mobile and PC game revenue and consumer spending patterns as a result of the line-by-line transaction data our industry partners send us. This gives us a sense of what we can expect on different platforms in terms of software revenue. We also use historical trends of other media, from digital cameras to smartphones and all the way back to television (as we believe VR to be a new medium rather than a gaming or entertainment peripheral).
This is combined with consumer spending trends and forecasts, public and private information we have gathered regarding money invested in VR, and survey data to get a sense of anticipated consumer interest and behavior.