Quest Store Surpasses $1.5 Billion in Content Revenue, Showing Continued Growth

When factoring significant Portal & less so Ray Ban glasses sales revenue(Portal went up 10x in sales early last year due to the pandemic driving sales), plus accessories off the released revenue figures here, we can see that the Qualcomm claims of 10 million(that they later retracted saying it was third-party analyst guesses) were wild of the mark. The actual Quest 2 units sold is significantly less.

There’s no avoiding that fact now. The question remains though, by how much, that’s much more difficult to pin down. It could be a lot less or a few million less. It’d be interesting to dive into that deeper, looking into past reports from Facebook on Portal’s dramatic increased success last year. And whether that, was sustained or not and how well did Ray Ban glasses do, plus accessories(Quest elite straps, facial pad packs, etc.) and any other aspects that are included in Reality Labs revenue figures. I’m sure there are other things missed that would reduce the numbers a bit more too, or perhaps by a fair amount. Hard to tell.

I think the quest 2 might have had its sales peak. It needs to release as much software as it can this year. Cambria will segment the market if it has exclusive games and itll be hard to justify devs the higher cost of the smaller market. I hope cambria brings some kind of vr cloud tech paving the way for aaa mobile vr gaming. That way all future headsets will always be apart of the same ecosystem and wont have to rebuild the userbase every generation.

Yet you mostly seems to be one of the most negative users on these boards towards VR and vr-games.

I think coverage of market stats from VR’s #1 underwriter (valuable stats nonetheless, but there’s still a clear conflict of interest in how they portray things) should be balanced with coverage of 3rd party stats. Stats from developers hitched to this industry aren’t much better, i.e. trying to claim someone that used their headset at least once during a particular month immediately following a big holidays sales period is an “active user”.

Naturally I don’t think it should be the goal of VR journalists to boost the industry but rather to paint an accurate picture of it.

For example the latest Piper Sandler survey (~14,500 participants) has 26% of teens owning a VR headset but a whopping 86% of them using their headset on a monthly basis or less (and about half of that 86% uses their headset less frequently or just not at all). And the percentage of users that fall into the “infrequent/inactive user” camp has been increasing–it was 82% in the Spring but now it’s 86%. Nearly 90% of these surveyed teens have iPhones and are in Apple’s ecosystem so we can’t just keep lazily applying the “they’re just GearVRs / Daydreams” excuse (not to mention, as teens in 2022 many are just too young for GearVR/Daydream).

In other words, millions of headsets have been sold and people may buy a few games (the New World Notes blog estimates 2 to 3 game sales per user based on the reported figures) but the curse of VR persists: poor usage and retention.