HTC Vive Saw 15,000 Pre-Orders In Its First 10 Minutes

It seems there's a lot of people out there ready to dive into the future of consumer virtual reality devices. The new consumer edition of HTC's Vive headset is priced at $799, but that didn't stop eager buyers from placing their pre-order when sales opened on Monday morning. Turns out the first 10 minutes alone saw 15,000 orders placed, said HTC VR employee Shen Ye on Twitter earlier today.

That's over 1,000 pre-orders per minute for the new VR headset, bringing it close to the rate of orders for recent iPhone launches. It's impressive in that VR is still a brand new consumer technology — there's been no previous product yet to gauge buyers' interest.

And with that comes the realization that we don't actually know how well the HTC Vive's pre-orders did in on a large scale. One would expect the first 10 minutes to see lots of tech enthusiasts eager to place an order, but what the hour after that? Or the first 24 hours?

By comparison, we also don't know any pre-order numbers for the Oculus Rift, the Vive's biggest rival at the moment, which went on sale in January with a $599 price tag. Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey noted in the first few days that the pre-order numbers were higher than he expected, but that doesn't reveal much.

There's also the fact that the audience for VR hardware is going to be much smaller than something like a new iPhone, for example. There's a limited number of consumers who can afford headsets more expensive than new game consoles by themselves, and already have high-end PCs that can power them.

Still, it's nice to hear both the Vive and Rift are off to a good start. We'll have to wait until the first shipments begin arriving in late March and early April for those early pre-orders to see how consumers react to their first real venture into VR.

SOURCE Shen Ye/Twitter