Let’s talk about the current state of the Meta Quest Store in 2023!
A recent newsletter was released by Simon Carless exploring the current state of Quest 2 VR games and it shines a light on certain aspects of the VR market as it pertains the the Quest 2. If you don’t know about Simon Carless, he runs a newsletter called The GameDiscoverCo that does analysis and insights on how people find and buy games. You should definitely consider checking them out here.
The article uses information and data from Cassia Curran and a report commissioned by FOV Ventures. Here is a direct link to the article itself here.
The Quest Store is Small, Which is Great!
According to the newsletter, the current Meta Quest store is incredibly small. We’re talking only 275 paid games on the Quest Store, which compare that to Steam, which has over 50,000 games. Although one could interpret this as developers aren’t creating for VR, the more likely culprit is Meta being more picky about what is allowed on the Quest Store in the first place. This can be reflected in the fact that there are over triple the number of VR games on Sidequest and the Quest App Lab.
The good news here is that smaller studios and their games can get discovered with such small amount of competition. The bad news is that you’ll have to defeat the standards of Meta before you’re allowed onto their coveted store front. If you can break through that barrier, then odds are you’ll be in a good position to at least sell a few copies of your game instead of being lost in the 50,000 that exist on Steam.
Estimating Quest Store Sales
To estimate what some of the possible sales might be for the top games on the Quest Store, Simon takes the number of user ratings and multiplies it by a factor of 110. This factor can be as low as 75 for niche games and as high as 250 for more casual games like Among Us VR, according to Simon’s newsletter.
Although the range is big, it’s helpful and gives some estimate of what you could expect with a successful launch. Let’s take Ark and Ade, a retro shooter that released at the beginning of March 2023. It’s currently sitting at 130 reviews for $10. Using our estimations, it could be bringing in revenue around $143,000 (If we ignore Meta taking 30%). Not bad for one month of sales!
We can also see what a game with a little more time looks like using Compund, another retro shooter released at the beginning of December 2022. It’s now sitting at 431 reviews for $20, leaving it’s estimated revenue to be $948,200. Not bad for someone who developed the game SOLO!
You may want to consider using these estimates with games that have been released to the Quest Store that are similar to ones you’re developing too. It might give you some insight into what kind of sales your specific genre in VR might produce.
Speaking of genres, let’s talk about which ones are selling and which one’s aren’t.
VR Genres in 2023
The newsletter continues on to highlight more data from Cassia’s analysis that defines the top 20 genres on the Quest Store by median revenue. It focuses on the median instead of the average, since games like Beat Saber can skew the averages too much.
Here we can observe that Fighting, RPG, Music/Rhythm, Horror and Shooters occupy the top spots on the list. This may suggest a trend towards genres that are better suited to the relatively new medium of VR. Perhaps creating a game that combines elements of Fighting, RPG, Rhythm and Horror could be a winning formula that would allow us to retire comfortably!
This data also lines up with a quote Simon takes from Chris Pruett, Meta’s head of third-party games. In his talk at GDC 2023 he stated “The most popular genres on the Quest Store include multiplayer competitive, physics combat, horror adventure, fitness and workout, social collaborative, shooters, single-player narrative adventure, boxing/golf and sports, RPG, simulation and survival.”
Multiplayer VS Singleplayer
One of the most interesting points in the newsletter regards Multiplayer games vs Singleplayer titles. According to the analysis from Cassia, Multiplayer titles are performing better than Singleplayer. With Multiplayer games averaging around $5.2 million vs Singleplayer games averaging around $3.5 million.
Don’t take this as a sign that you now need to make your game Multiplayer, but I do think it shows that VR might shine better when players get to interact with others and more importantly their friends. Maybe this is also a sign that I should make a Multiplayer tutorial sometime.
More than What's Here
There are many more things to cover in Simon’s newsletter, but for this post, I’m going to end it here. These were just some of the data points I found interesting and I suggest you head over and check it out too!