Analyst: PlayStation VR to outsell Oculus Rift, HTC Vive next year

Global market research firm IHS has chosen to capitalize on Sony's big press conference at Paris Games Week today by predicting that the PlayStation VR headset will outsell both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive in 2016.

While this is only an educated guess, developers who are working on (or considering working on) virtual reality games should take note of the reasoning behind the firm's analysis, which is summed up below in a handy chart.

PlayStation VR is pegged as an early market leader in part because the headset has a big potential market: IHS predicts more than 37 million PlayStation 4 consoles will be sold worldwide by the middle of 2016. By comparison, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets require medium- to high-spec PCs, which the firm predicts will be less than half as numerous as Sony's latest console by the middle of next year.

“Overall we expect a slow ramp up of adoption and consumption of VR content,” stated IHS analyst Piers Harding-Rolls in a press release today. “While the market is more advanced than ever, there are still a number of hurdles that need to be overcome before we see broader consumer adoption.”

Analysts at the firm also believe that PlayStation VR will be cheaper to own than either the Oculus or HTC consumer VR rigs, though none of the headsets have yet been given an official price.

That lower price of entry, alongside the potential power of Sony's marketing department and first-party developers, is driving IHS analysts to predict that PlayStation VR will ship 1.5 million units by the end of 2016.

You can check out IHS' latest report on the virtual reality market in full over on its website if you're a subscriber.