TikTok’s parent comapny, China’s ByteDance, owns a VR headset company, Pico, and despite the pressures that bear down on the company from western regulators, it is not backing away from a fight with Meta as both social media heavyweights keep slugging away at each other. This is a nice juxtaposition with an earlier story on Meta’s microLED manufacturing deal.
According The Wall Street Journal, Pico’s headset shipments are now number 2 behind Meta’s in the global battle for VR headset sales, albeit it is still a relatively small number for companies used to thinking in billions of users.
Meta has long dominated the industry thanks to the accessibly priced Quest 2, which has captured 84.6% of the global AR/VR headset market during the first three quarters of 2022. The next closest competitor has been ByteDance’s Pico with 7.4% share over the same period. The top 5 list is rounded out by DPVR (1.8%), HTC (1.1%), and iQIYI (0.9%). However, each of these companies will face challenges next year as Sony’s next generation headset launches and Apple also enters the market.
IDC
The most recent data shows that while Meta has seen a big drop in sales, Pico is growing. Given that Meta copies ByteDance and ByteDance copies Meta, this is not an unusual turn of events, and it wasn’t that long ago when Tik Tok was a smaller social network nipping at the heels of Meta before rapidly rising to become the one to beat. With Pico headsets gaining traction at a pretty fast clip, it will be interesting to see how ByteDance leverages the content.
Granted, Meta is streets ahead in terms of having content for its headsets, even if it often seem to be not that great. However, what ByteDance has in Tik Tok is an innate awareness of what its consumers want and they seem to have beaten Meta at every turn when it comes to pleasing their user base. That should be a good thing for all VR enthusiasts.
The pressures on ByteDance to turn Tik Tok into a US company and avoid being labeled an instrument of Chinese government data gathering aside, the rest of the world is not as willing to close off the company. No matter what happens, at this rate, ByteDance will probably be able to match Meta on headset numbers by 2024 and that will surely mean a virtual reality dance off or rumble or something fun to keep us all amused while we try and figure out how many more billions of dollars is Meta going to lose on its metaverse bet.
