Understanding the VR market in 2021:
Oculus Quest & Oculus Quest 2 Focus
By Catherine Allen, Limina Immersive, January 2021
In 2021 Limina Immersive surveyed 3,544 British internet users to find out the approximate proportion of the population who own a VR headset and the characteristics of those who own a VR headset. The sample was broadly reflective of the UK population’s demographic make-up. Our findings are documented below.
FINDINGS
HOW BIG IS THE UK VR AVAILABLE MARKET?
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Overall, 4% of respondents own a VR headset.
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Most of these headsets are ones involving a mobile phone (mobile VR or Google Cardboard) - 2.7% of respondents own a mobile VR headset.
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1.7% of respondents own a high-end VR headset, e.g., Oculus Quest, Oculus Rift, PSVR and HTC Vive.
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This means that over a million UK residents own a high-end VR headset (1,067,508 people) [1]. According to analysis firm Omdia, Oculus has a market share of 48%, meaning there are circa. half a million Quest Go and Rift owners in the UK. The UK data on Quest owners specifically is limited, but I would take an expert guess, using various industry data sources, that 65% of these devices are Quests, meaning that there around 300,000 Quest owners currently in the UK (307,442 to be specific).
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According to analysis firm Omdia, Oculus has a market share of 48%, meaning there are circa. half a million Quest Go and Rift owners in the UK. The UK data on specifically Quest owners is limited, but I would take an expert guess, using various industry data sources, that 65% of Oculus devices owned are Quests, meaning there will be around 300,000 Quest owners currently in the UK (307,442).
If you are making VR targeted at UK Oculus Quest users, these estimated 300,000 Quest owners are your current available market. But this available market is set to grow steadily. 2% of our respondents said they don’t own a VR headset but are planning on buying one this year. The age group most likely to say they were planning on purchasing a headset are 18 – 24 year olds.
WHO ARE THESE 300,000 PEOPLE?
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There is a slight gender gap amongst high end VR headset owners. 56% of headset owners are men and 44% are women.
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The age demographic over 18 most likely to own a high-end VR headset is 35 – 44. As the survey did not poll under 18s, we do not know about children’s headset ownership. We also do not know the proportion of people who own VR headsets having purchased them for their children to use.
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Ethnic diversity is overall, good; BAME users are overrepresented as a whole. 21% of high-end VR headset owners are BAME, whereas 14% of the UK population are BAME [2].
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10% of high-end VR users are Asian or Asian British, whereas 4.2% of the population are Asian or Asian British.
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Men who own VR headsets tend to be younger (aged 18 – 34) whereas women owners are more evenly distributed across age groups,
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VR headset users tend to have slightly more leisure time than the rest of the population. This is especially evident with women users.
DISCUSSION
It is of note that the gender and age profile of VR headset owners appears different from other data available on who has tried VR. Research from a range of sources including ComRes, EY, GlobalWebIndex and YouGov all found significant gender and age gaps in people who have already tried VR. For instance, GlobalWebIndex found in 2018 that 30% of men had tried VR vs 16% of women. They also found that someone 35 – 44 was more than twice as likely to have tried VR than someone 25 – 24. This indicates that headset ownership is actually more reflective of the population than people who have simply ‘had a go’.
Most importantly, it also suggests that the stereotypes of the average VR user are inaccurate when it comes to actual headset owners.
[1] This was worked out using ONS’ statistic of 92.5% of the UK population being internet users.
