Perennial VR Classic ‘Job Simulator’ Hits 6 Million Installs, Averaging 600,000 Units Annually

By
Scott Hayden
-
5

Google-owned XR studio Owlchemy Labs announced that its breakout VR hit Job Simulator (2016) has now surpassed six million installs.

Job Simulator has been one of the most successful VR games over the past decade, having not found firm footing as a launch title for the original HTC Vive, PSVR, and Oculus Touch back in 2016, but also for having pioneered many of the fundamentals VR developers rely on today.

In short, the madcap simulator parody was one of the first to really nail VR object interaction while serving up immersive room-scale gameplay.

And while you’d expect a bulk of those 6 million installs to come from its earliest days as a regular chart topper, it wasn’t until early 2020 that Job Simulator officially went platinum, selling over 1 million copies.

By then, Job Simulator had already found its next wave of success on Quest, later coming to PSVR 2 and Apple Vision Pro in 2023 and 2024 respectively.

Notably, the number of installs probably doesn’t directly reflect units sold—decidedly a more direct measure of its success with consumers—although it may not be that far off.

In 2016, Job Simulator came free with HTC Vive for a limited time, which may count towards installs and not sales as such. It was also included in Meta’s Horizon Plus subscription games service in March 2025, which lets Quest users download select titles and keep them as long as they’re subscribers. That’s another place the studios might feel more confident counting install numbers and not sales.

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Another place is VR arcades. In 2024, leading software distributor SpringboardVR said Job Simulator was their top-performing game thanks to its popularity with kids and VR first-timers. And those arcades weren’t buying Job Simulator—SpringboardVR is a games subscription service with an enterprise-focused licensing structure.

In addition to the news, Owlchemy Labs announced its free-to-play multiplayer Quest game Dimensional Double Shift crossed the one million download mark just over a year after its open beta launch, with the studio noting that the Job Sim-style social game recently became its fastest-growing title, with players logging 2.5 million total hours since its open beta launch in September 2024.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: Owlchemy Labs VR history goes even beyond "Job Simulator", despite it being the first commercial PC VR-only game; it being one of the most successful VR games for pretty much the last decade and (only) now reaching 6M installs is why there are no (not paid for by Meta/Sony/Valve) AAA VR games.

    There is almost nothing going further back regarding commercial VR-only games than Owlchemy Labs' "Job Simulator". The first time I played (a pre-release version of) "Job Simulator" was at gamescom 2015, where HTC used it alongside Valve's "The Lab" and Wevr's "theBlu" as part of their show case for the (Pre-)Vive, eight months before both the HMD and the game launched in April 2016. It quickly became THE poster child for VR allowing players to interact directly with objects in a way no other video game can.

    And even though it then took "Job Simulator" almost four years to reach 1M units sold, it was still only the second VR-only game to achieve this. The first was of course "Beat Saber", which hit that milestone in February 2019, just nine months after its early access start, and three months before it officially launched on PSVR/PCVR.

    But Job Simulator wasn't even Owlchemy Labs' first commercial VR-only game. That honor goes to "Caaaaardboard!", a base jumping game released in December 2014 for Google Cardboard. This became my go-to for impromptu on-the-road VR demos using my phone and a foldable VR viewer, and never failed to impress due to being based on an existing game from a team that had already a lot of VR experience, which was quite an insane feat for late 2014, and very cleverly working around the comfort/nausea issues that plagued many early VR titles. The game itself was a port from the DK1 "Aaaaa!" demo, which again was the VR adaption of the 2011 flat game "AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! For The Awesome", that thanks to being created with Unity took only two days to get to run once they got their hands on the development kit, but then another months to make it fun and not have users throw up.

    The numbers and "first" rankings change when you include VR-also games, where Euro Truck Simulator 2 was probably the first adding official VR/DK1 support as early as October 2013, and 2017 hybrid RE7 on PSVR1 was whipping all VR-only sales/installs records with 15M+ units sold. It is still kind of sad that one of the oldest, most well known VR games that was a launch title for pretty everything with 6DoF controllers or hand tracking, and never left the Horizon Store "top selling apps", took over a decade and lots of platforms to get to about half of what GTA 5 sold on PS3 and Xbox 360 within just the first 24h .

    And you don't even have to go AAA for such comparisons. "Stardew Valley", created by a single person and released only a few weeks before "Job Simulator", sold over 1M copies in the first two months, and more than 40M by today. A few years ago Microsoft said for them to be interested in developing/publishing a game, it has to have the potential to sell at least 10M copies. VR is still a tiny niche, and with recent developments probably meaning less investments and slower development, that's not going to change anytime soon.
    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/073425b891f66daad44ec8d4229b49b2ba365800822f44e0ad6bc5b220d3522e.jpg

    • kraeuterbutter

      the blu – with a modern headset -still looks impressive

      so colorfull, the jellyfish-swarm, the turtles, …

      10 years later with modern PC-hardware/graphiccards:
      is there something similar that uses current PC-Power?

  • Oxi

    Don't like being negative but personally, I don't get why anyone buys this when Vacation Simulator is much better, has much more content, and added an arcade mode that is basically this game anyway.

    • kraeuterbutter

      its the name…
      jobsimulator – when you followed VR from the beginning, you heard that..
      even when you not bought a headset..

      when back then a Vive was too expensive.. you grab today maybe a cheaper headset and:
      remember the title "job simulator" from back then..
      Jobsimulator like later beatsaber was synomym for VR

  • Well deserved