SIEE president Jim Ryan says PSVR pre-orders hit the “many hundreds of thousands”

Speaking to CNBC, president of Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe Jim Ryan has discussed the "massive" interest in PlayStation VR, saying that pre-order sales for the new virtual reality headset reached "many hundreds of thousands"

This comes after news surfaced at the weekend that GameStop sold nearly all of their first wave of PlayStation VR headsets on opening night, reported by The Street. According to a telephone interview with GameStop’s COO Tony Bartel: "We saw tremendous demand, and in fact right now many of our stores will be sold out of the first wave of Sony’s Playstation VR by tonight — we are working with them to try and get more product,"

This is good news for Sony, who no doubt had the spectre of Oculus’ disastrous launch hanging over them, where the company faced an unexpected component shortage that caused a severe delay to the delivery of many pre-orders that stretched back for several months.

"We know that the replenishment cycle is a good one," said Ryan, talking about how they’ll avoid those pitfalls to CNBC "production is going exactly as we anticipated. We have made decisions to further increase capacity at the back end of 2016 and into 2017, so there are going to be a lot of PlayStation VRs around the world, whether that’s enough to satisfy the demands of the market, we’ll see,"

SuperData Research has predicted Sony will sell 2.5m units, and as they’re already selling the product at a profit rather than loss-leading, this indicates a big chunk of change for Sony. For VR developers, this is a good indication that the PlayStation VR could very soon be the biggest audience to aim for.