HTC answers ‘death of VR’ stories with record Vive sales

Virtual reality headsets have faced gloomy forecasts since shortly after they hit the market, so one of the industry’s leaders decided today to directly address the naysayers. A blog post from HTC’s Vive team says that “news of the so-called death of VR comes once a year and is greatly exaggerated,” then rebuts the claims with a surprising new detail: Vive headsets recently sold out while experiencing record-breaking sales.

HTC was provoked to respond by a report that circulated two weeks ago, headlined with the claim that “consumer interest in VR appears to be declining” based on Amazon sales rank data. Though we received the report, we didn’t cover it because the supporting data struck us as too thin to support its theory. For instance, the report’s sole HTC-focused chart showed the original headset’s sales declining in June after noticeably picking up in late April.