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Facebook won't consider Oculus Rift 'meaningful' unless it hits 50+ million sales

Facebook won't consider Oculus Rift 'meaningful' unless it hits 50+ million sales

During Facebook's Q3 2014 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the opportunity to address the social giant's long range vision for its major virtual reality purchase, Oculus Rift.

His thoughts on the subject are certainly long term.

Zuckerberg set the user install base for Oculus Rift at 50-100 million before he, and Facebook, would consider it to be "a very meaningful thing as a computing platform."

Multiple hardware cycles

He's not expecting this number to be reached overnight, however.

"I don't think it's going to get to 50 million or 100 million units in the next few years. That will take a few cycles of the device to get there."

The timescale mentioned is somewhere in the region of 10 years, according to the Facebook founder, and the inital focus won't be on business building, but in establishing the ecosystem until it's ready to support the 100 million Oculus Rift owners that will turn the virtual reality platform it into a profit making venture.

It's not just the Oculus devkits that will see multiple hardware iterations.

Should Oculus Rift follow the current hardware trends of annual updates, that's a lot of hardware cycles before it eventually finds its business feet, though it's reassuring for the thousands of interested game developers - 100,000-plus Oculus Rift devkits have been sold - to know that Facebook is in it for the long haul.

But, of course, the really important number is how many of Facebook's 1.35 billion active monthly users will stump up for the hardware.

[source: The Guardian]

Yes. Spanner's his real name. And, yes, he's heard that joke before.