From Business Insider:
Facebook is closing around 200 of its 500 Oculus virtual reality demo stations at Best Buy locations across the US, Business Insider has learned.
The scaling back of Facebook's first big retail push for VR comes after workers from multiple Best Buy pop-ups told BI that it was common for them to go days without giving a single demonstration. An internal memo seen by BI and sent to affected employees said the closings were because of "store performance."
[...]
Multiple "Oculus Ambassador" workers BI spoke with said that, at most, they would sell a few Oculus headsets per week at most during the holiday season, and that foot traffic to their pop-ups decreased drastically after Christmas.
"There'd be some days where I wouldn't give a demo at all because people didn't want to," said one worker at a Best Buy in Texas who asked to remain anonymous. Another worker from California said that Oculus software bugs would often render his demo headsets unusable.
"They didn't press on selling," the worker from Texas said of Oculus. "Their main thing was to have us do demonstrations and get people talking about Oculus."
Ouch.
There's a reason why the hype around VR has died down this year, after reaching such a feverish pitch in 2016. It's because consumers really aren't buying it. They're not buying the hype, and they're not buying VR headsets, either, and the nascent VR industry doesn't seem to know what to do about that. The only VR headset that sold at all well is Samsung's Gear VR, which did all of its sales alongside Google's Cardboard -- that was when consumer interest was at its peak, allowing Cardboard to move 5 million units, with Gear VR close behind.
But that was then, and this is now, and right now, consumers have basically zero interest in VR. Google shipped 5 million units of Cardboard during the height of last year's early VR hype cycle, but this year, Verizon is literally giving the much more polished Daydream away with every Pixel smartphone. The likes of Phandroid (who provided the chart at right) are still trying to hype 2017 as VR's year, but for reals this time, unlike 2016 which they said would be VR's year but which ultimately flopped, but it all feels more than a little desperate. You can practically smell the flop sweat.
VR has too many unsolved problems, too few worthwhile apps that make good use of the technology, and no sign that VR's pushers have any idea yet just what VR is really good for; the tech feels like it was rolled out to the marketplace while still being in beta, and the first impression that its made is hurting not only sales of VR, but interest in VR. When the second-highest-profile brand of VR headset can't even get people to try the thing in-store, I think it's fair to say that VR is in trouble.
Consumers are voting with their feet and wallets, and it's hurting VR adoption across the board. HTC Vive isn't selling that much better then Oculus Rift, and even Sony's PSVR is struggling. VR isn't ready yet, and companies fighting for their share of the VR market may do better to work together on solving the platform's issues, so that they actually have a market to divvy up. Because right now, they really don't.