Facebook-Owned Oculus Having Hard Time Finding Takers for VR

Facebook bought Oculus few years back with the hope that VR content and ecosystem will get a big push.

Mark Zuckerberg, walking around a crowd immersed in virtual reality. 

(Photo Reuters)

Facebook-acquired Virtual Reality (VR) firm Oculus may not be profitable as the social networking giant is struggling to bring VR to the mainstream consumer market, says Jack McCauley, one of the co-founders of Oculus.

According to a report in CNBC late Sunday, with Facebook positioning its VR-based Oculus devices primarily as gaming machines, McCauley does not believe there is much of a market for the device.

"There are a lot of fundamental issues that remain unsolved with VR gaming," said the Oculus Co-founder who stayed through Facebook's $2 billion acquisition of the company in March 2014.

McCauley mentioned how people still get nauseated when they put on a VR headset and how they still prefer to play video games alongside their friends on a 2D display.

Facebook announced VR headset called "Oculus Go" at a starting price of $199 (Rs 13,731 approx) in October 2017. The Oculus Go has sold a little more than 2 million units, according to market research firm SuperData.

The "Oculus Quest", which was made available in May this year, has sold nearly 1.1 million units while the Oculus Rift has sold 547,000 units, said the report.

Facebook recently unveiled "Oculus Rift S", a new version of its PC headset Oculus Rift, for $399 (Rs 27,531 approx). It’s interesting that Oculus has kept its focused markets limited to most of the US and parts of Europe.

Till date, we’ve not seen any of the Oculus products launching in emerging countries like India, where Facebook caters to over billion users across all of its co-owned platforms.