Earlier this year, game industry analytics firm SuperData Research Inc released a report predicting the near future of the virtual reality market, saying that it believed the VR industry would reach $5.1 billion in revenue in 2016, but now the firm has said that it may have been a bit too optimistic with that number and has lowered its forecast roughly 30 percent.

“Since we published our original figures, we have had a number of conversations with both hardware and software developers, as well as access to newly public information.” Stephanie Llamas, director of research at SuperData, recently told GamesIndustry.biz.

“We previously overestimated PC and mobile hardware penetration and underestimated console hardware sales. Console will be high-end VR’s white horse since it has lower hardware requirements, easier set-up and lower pricing. PlayStation’s 35 million-plus users are also a far larger accessible audience than that of high-end PCs, which tops off at about 17 million.”

Llamas referenced a recent Vision Summit keynote given by Unity Technologies CEO John Riccitiello, who said that he believed most VR predictions have been overly optimistic in the short-term yet too conservative in the long term.

“John Riccitiello’s ‘gap of disappointment’ (slow hardware adoption that accelerates after a few years) forced us to take a harder look at hardware’s growth within a historical narrative,” Llamas said. “We found that media adoption (e.g., TV, computers, smartphones, etc.) has always seen exponential growth that can be attributed to easier access and decreasing prices.”

“However, this initial lull in adoption has shortened due to both product visibility on a global scale and the speed at which manufacturing costs drop. So although we see that initial struggle for VR, there will be a relatively quick push upward within the next 3-5 years.”

As a result of its more conservative approach to the near-term performance of VR, SuperData has lowered its forecast for 2016 from $5.1 billion to $3.6 billion. However, the firm still believes that the VR industry will see rapid growth in the next few years, predicting that the market will reach $22.9 billion by 2020.

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