Forget the Quest 2's Install Base -- How Many Quest 2 Owners Are Active? (Comments of the Week)

Above: Most popular games in the Quest store as of today

I spent much of last week pondering the mystery of why Meta hasn't announced that the Quest 2 has crossed a 10 million unit install base (as it almost certainly has by now, based on earnings reports). Reader Zack makes an even better point:

Consider Meta might actually experience terrible numbers of ACTIVE users... I personally worked in VR since DK2 days, 2015 or so. I own a Quest 1, and although I believe in this tech's future, I still have to fight my way into my next VR session, every not so often time I decide to wear it.

So only guessing here... if say 50%+ of Quest2 owners don't even use their headsets past the first 30 hours of "novelty and excitement" phase... THAT would be really embarrassing for them... and I feel that's the reason why 10M units is not enough to have a self-sustaining ecosystem.

While Zuckerberg did say 10 million was Meta's magic install base milestone, Zack's point helped remind me to double check Zuck's specific wording in 2020:

We had this milestone in our mind that first we needed to get the technology to the place where you could have a standalone headset, it could be portable, it could be high quality — do the tracking and all that. And Quest was the big milestone on that. Then, from an ecosystem perspective, we believed that if we get to 10 million units active, then that’s kind of a critical magic number.

Emphasis mine! That could really solve the mystery: Maybe 10 million Quest 2 units are sold, but that doesn't mean 10 million are being actively used. 

Martin K. chimes in on that tip:

The 9 most popular "apps" on Meta Quest remind me of the good old days of the Oculus Go; the top 3 games on Meta Quest are all older than 3 years. That doesn't mean that we won't see that content explosion in one or two years and the estimate of 10 million users is actually correct; but it's too early to tell.

You can see that too early-ness in the screengrab from under an hour ago: The top game is Beat Saber (from a studio recently purchased by Meta), which is very much a fun game... from 2019. The other titles are from 2021 or before. For instance, Epic Roller Coasters  -- wow people really want to vomitously ride a coaster in VR? OK, then! -- is also from 2019. And that also includes, notably, VRChat and Rec Room, which are more or less competitors to Meta's Horizon.

If Quest 2's install base really was highly active, shouldn't we see at least one or two new games in the top of the charts? As a point of comparison, the top five most played games on Steam at the moment include a couple from this year. (MultiVersus and Lost Ark.)

So the mystery continues... and deepens.

Comments

[Mondy]

I'm wondering where you think active users 'hang out' to discuss what they're playing and using their Quests for ?
Most of the time it seems to be in reddit, at least that's what I'm finding and also, Steam and the Quest store isn't really where you're going to be finding all the latest buzz. Sidequest is where most people are picking up what's being actively played and talked about. Even when something makes it onto applab, people are still getting it most of the time through Sidequest and discussing it on reddit, watching YouTube content streamers and Twitch streamers, actively talking about it on their feeds as people play.
I'm constantly hearing VR is dying or it's over and had it's day. A couple of years ago it was that it was never going to take off! Does that sound familiar? It's the same thing people say about Second life. Often by the type of people that have never tried it or never use it.

[Joey1058]

Well, I had a Q2 for about 6 months, and sold it at a loss. I was finally able to see what all the VR hype was about, and I didn't have a proper reason to keep it. My focus has been, and always will be mixed reality. And I don't feel that in a Q2, with my peripheral vision blocked off. So if Zuck is looking for 10M active users, then Meta missed the boat. Let's hope they stay afloat for the next wave.

[Mondy]

I think it's worth pointing out that the Quest store can't pick up how many people are using Quests for PCVR, some of the most active people I know in the Quest community have Quest 2's as a gateway into PCVR gaming, not for games on the Quest store, and as in my previous comment, most of the better games coming out now and in the last year have been on Sidequest and AppLab which isn't reflected in the Quest store figures. Of the ones you mention as being most popular, of course something like roller coasters is going to be, it's a novelty value most people will want to try, not something people will use over and over, like Richie's plank experience, massive downloads but only to show friends at parties. As for Beat Sabre, it's a great game , and there are others there you left off such as Contractors, Golf+, Eleven table tennis, Population One (which recently had a massive update) that constantly get great reviews, regular updates and large numbers playing them.

[Watchring]

Most people are likely picking apps they enjoy and sticking with them. Rec Room, VRChat, Gorilla Tag, and Pavlov are big ones for sure, but you won't find the latter on this list since they are on AppLab.

Additionally, we're probably not seeing any 2022 titles on this list because there hasn't been anything worthy of it if we're being realistic. BONELAB will probably be the next thing up there when that releases later this year.

I also don't think it's a problem if only about 50% of users are active, as that would put it in line with retention estimates for modern game consoles.

[lieisacake]

VR has awful retention, and even for the users that are "active" most don't actually use it all that much. Linked below is a large survey that was performed just after the Quest 2's most significant holiday sales period: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/u22ers/new_vr_market_research_26_of_teens_own_a_vr/ And over a period of 6-12 months and longer, you will see these numbers get much, much worse.

This would be fine if there wasn't so much hype and it was actually treated like any other early technology. But that's not what's happening: VR is being hyped up, subsidized, and invested in like a mainstream technology. Facebook is desperately looking for the "next big thing" so they can dominate it and cement their data collection platform on it before the existing big consumer platforms can monopolize it, and they've chosen VR and AR as candidates. Think of other major technologies and imagine if they were aggressively hyped up and subsidized while they were still premature. You would see similar results.

There are a few major theories for why consumers don't stick with it (at least with the modern rendition of the tech) but that's another discussion.

[Wagner James Au]

Yikes! Thanks for the link!

[Mondy]

That was hardly a 'large' survey. Just over 7000 of 10 million? and of those only 25% even owned a headset. so they weren't even surveying a majority of people that owned one. I commented in that thread 4 months ago and asked what would the results have been if they had surveyed people from the Occulus sub-reddits?
I'm betting pretty different. Surveys and statistics don't show the whole picture. If they did then the home computer revolution would never have taken off either, something else that was massively hyped in the 80's and 90's. Who remembers hearing "We bought a computer but now it's just up in the attic"?
I'm beginning to sound like a Facebook evangelist with this being my 3rd post but far from it. I can't wait for a Facebook login to no longer be a requirement as they promised later this month, but there are a lot of companies in VR, many better than Meta, Meta just happen to be the entry level right now and the amount of bull and fud going around is unbelievable.

[Sven Viking]

“ If Quest 2's install base really was highly active, shouldn't we see at least one or two new games in the top of the charts?”

Not disagreeing with your overall point but I thought Gun Raiders was relatively new?

Interestingly one of the most popular games, Gorilla Tag, isn’t in the list because they still won’t allow it on the main store.

[lieisacake]

@Mondy "Who remembers hearing "We bought a computer but now it's just up in the attic"?"

That's the thing: over the long term I absolutely think VR will be something big. But just like home computers in the 80s and PDAs/"smartphones" in the 90s, it's not ready for mass adoption and this is what users' interaction with the current implementations of the technology is showing time and time again. As with computers and smartphones, it wasn't just that some big megacorp hadn't invested enough in those mediums, but rather the technologies themselves were fundamentally not suitable for markets of a mass scale. I say this despite the fact that I consider myself a sort of "VR enthusiast" (an overused term) and love developing for the technology. But I also think it could be many years before VR is able to sort through its many challenges.

E.g. I think that, fundamentally, most people hate flat stereo displays (despite being dazzled by them, at least initially), and so VR will need to provide an adequate simulation of the lightfield if you want people to actually use it past the honeymoon. It could easily be another decade before we see somewhat passable implementations of this. And there's a long list of other hard problems.