Meta says over $2 billion has been spent on Quest content material to this point, and month-to-month headset utilization elevated 30% in 2024.
The figures had been revealed at this time at a GDC 2025 speak by Meta’s Director of Video games Chris Pruett. Meta Actuality Labs, the corporate’s {hardware} and metaverse division, has introduced in a complete of $9 billion since Quest 2 launched, suggesting that over 80% of its income has come from {hardware} and different companies, with lower than 20% coming from content material income.
Meta has given a complete retailer spend determine twice prior to now. In February 2022 the corporate stated over $1 billion had been spent on the Quest Retailer, and in October 2022 it stated this determine had surpassed $1.5 billion.
The revelation of headset utilization per thirty days growing by 30% in 2024 follows Pruett’s announcement finally 12 months’s GDC that Quest 3 has increased retention than earlier Meta headsets.
“The quantity of people that personal and are actively utilizing a headset is bigger than it has ever been”, Pruett advised the viewers at this time.
Free-To-Play Apps Now Account For 70% Of Time Spent On Quest
Meta says that over 70% of time spent on Quest headsets is now in free-to-play apps.
Whereas whole platform spending elevated 12% in 2024, a determine Meta beforehand gave in response to developer considerations, the kind of spending and sort of content material bringing in income considerably modified.
Final month Meta revealed that free-to-play apps now account for 70% of time spent on Quest, with Pruett acknowledging that this has include a discount in spending for some paid titles. Nevertheless, he notes that almost all of income nonetheless comes from paid titles.
Whereas a few of the shift is particular to VR/MR, Pruett famous that it mirrors wider traits throughout the video games business, the place “spending is flat, funding has dried up, the one video games that appear to be doing very properly are large stay service titles and indie darlings”.
As for Quest particularly, Pruett stated that the launch of Quest 3S “signaled a bigger viewers shift than we anticipated”. Quest 3S patrons are youthful on common, he defined, with not as a lot disposable revenue as earlier Quest headset patrons. Whereas teenager patrons have been rising with each headset launch, with Quest 3S they now signify the vast majority of each patrons and energetic customers, he revealed.
These teenage Quest customers, he explains, “wish to play the identical kinds of video games they’re taking part in elsewhere”, primarily free-to-play titles with a robust give attention to social interplay resembling Gorilla Tag and paid “meme video games” resembling I Am Cat.
Additional, a brand new viewers of mainstream grownup Quest patrons have emerged that are not as fascinated about immersive VR or blended actuality apps in any respect, seeing their headset “as an extension of their TV—a tool primarily for media consumption”.
“They like sports activities, motion films, live shows—every kind of stuff. In addition they play video games on their telephones or consoles, nevertheless it’s a secondary pastime.”
From Quest To Horizon: How Meta’s Shifting Priorities Are Affecting Builders
With rising considerations about declining gross sales and discoverability, UploadVR spoke with practically two dozen VR studios to debate the present state of transport VR video games on Quest.
In keeping with Pruett it’s this shift, and never the opening of the shop or give attention to Horizon Worlds, that’s liable for the overwhelming majority of the discount of income that some builders who had been concentrating on VR fanatic patrons have been reporting.
He stated that as Meta opened the shop, it examined the change by exposing completely different customers “to the outdated view and the brand new view”, and after months of monitoring the outcomes discovered a lower than 1% distinction in spending. He says Meta ran the identical experiment for its heavy promotion of Horizon Worlds within the telephone app and located it decreased spending “by 3% at most”. Total, neither of those modifications result in a discount in general spending, with it in reality rising by 12% in 2024.
Most VR fanatics come to the shop already figuring out what they wish to purchase anyhow, Pruett claimed, and thus these modifications did not a lot have an effect on them.
“We notice that 2024 had plenty of change all of sudden. We spent a very long time unpacking and untangling the impression of those modifications as a result of it’s simple to conflate correlation with causation. The analysis isn’t carried out but—we’re nonetheless studying and fine-tuning. For instance, our retailer rating algorithm has modified considerably a number of instances over the past 12 months. It’s an ongoing mission, and we don’t at all times get it proper. Fortunately, the information tells us fairly clearly after we’ve made errors so we are able to course appropriate.”
