PlayStation VR Dominates Virtual Reality Market Destroying Oculus Rift And HTC Vive [Video]

The Sony PlayStation VR, launched only last October after delays, have suddenly emerged as a leader in the VR race albeit coming in late in the game by earlier established Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Only a couple of months after its release, PlayStation VR has taken the lion's share of the market, outselling its biggest competitors.

In our earlier report, we covered that the PlayStation VR is set to overtake the combined sales of Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in the United Kingdom (UK). Seemingly, after doing just that in the U.K., another milestone has been garnered by Sony and its PlayStation VR for cornering 30 percent of the virtual reality market way ahead of its direct competitors.

A market research conducted by 01consulting, who is tracking data for the past few months revealed that Sony's PlayStation VR has a dominant share of the market while bigger rivals are left trailing off at 11 percent for the Oculus Rift and six percent for HTC Vive. The report included estimates of over 30 companies and 40 products around the world, placing Playstation VR as the leader in its field, VentureBeat reported.

The data presented consists of companies with VR technologies but not entirely focused on hardware. Also on the list are software giants Unity (6 percent), Epic Games (5 percent) and Crytek (4 percent). But still, figures show that Sony dominates at 30 percent, followed by Facebook who owns Oculus Rift at 11 percent, and Google at eight percent. HTC, who owns the HTC Vive (6 percent) is outranked by Samsung who has Gear VR at seven percent.

Moreover, the report also tackled revenue as well as units sold by each vendor. Apparently, gains held by Sony is due to its lower price point offering for the PlayStation VR. Another contributing factor to Sony's numbers is its massive install base, GameRant reported.

As reported, HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift are both great VR platforms but both suffer one major flaw, that is their expensive price. Even if PlayStation VR for the moment is the clear leader, the VR market is still relatively small. What is needed is to provide more apps and games to entice more people to embrace the platform.