Thursday, 13 January, 2022 UTC
Summary
One of our 2022 predictions — spotlighted in an article last week — is that the Meta Quest 2 will reach its target of 10 million lifetime units sold in 2022. This goal was previously stated by Mark Zuckerberg (more on that in a bit). It now appears that it could hit that milestone even sooner.
Specifically, this 10-million mark will likely come in 2022 as expected, but could be very early in the year. Evidence to that effect comes from holiday sales signals. For one, the Oculus app — used to set up and manage Quest 2 — was the top downloaded iOS app on Christmas weekend.
More evidence comes from app analytics firm Apptopia, which reports that Oculus app installs jumped more than 150 percent year-over-year during Christmas weekend. In absolute numbers (extrapolated estimates), that equates to 650,000 downloads, up from 255,000 in 2020.
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This supports projections of our research arm, ARtillery Intelligence, which estimated a considerable Q4 surge in Quest 2 sales. This was informed partly by last year’s holiday sales, gradual demand growth for VR, and Quest 2’s giftable (and aggressive) price point.
Further Evidence
Beyond app store rankings and Apptopia estimates, a few other market signals validate a holiday sales spike for Quest 2. So for this week’s Data Dive, we’ve rounded up five of them. See them below in no particular order (thanks to our friends at Upload for some of the legwork).
1. Golf+
Golf+ — a game we spent time playing on Christmas Day — experienced a notable sales spike, shown below in the difference between 2020 (green line) and 2021 (blue line).
🎄That Christmas spike is real!! Happy Oculus Quest 2 day!
For reference yesterday was our best sales day ever and today is already 30% bigger with the better half still to come!
Green line is last year’s unit sales by hour.#VR 🚀🚀🚀 pic.twitter.com/aieLob9LHI
- Ryan Engle (@Rengle820) December 25, 2021
2. Eleven Table Tennis
Speaking of casual sports titles, the popular Eleven Table Tennis has exceeded 1,800 daily players on and following Christmas day. The delta from regular levels can be seen in the chart below.
@ElevenVR online players stats https://t.co/tCJU8GMlnF pic.twitter.com/yqwDiPGPCb
- Henri Lt (@henrilatr) December 25, 2021
3. Gorilla Tag
Breakout Oculus App Lab title Gorilla Tag hit 344,000 unique users on December 26 and reached 26,000 concurrent users. Look out for that AWS bill.
absolutely bonkers christmas weekend for gorilla tag. hit 344k unique users today, and peaked at just over 26k concurrent users
- LemmingVR (@LemmingVR) December 27, 2021
4. Hand Physics Lab
Sandbox game Hand Physics Lab also reports a Christmas-day inflection. See the evidence below.
This Christmas sales spike is insane! Many many new people jumped into VR!
Yesterday’s sales have been unprecedented for @HandPhysicsLab, not even launch day comes close!
So happy to see so many new people playing and enjoying it! 😃🙌 pic.twitter.com/bn3TOdruKL
- Dennys Kuhnert (@DennysKuhnert) December 26, 2021
5. Rec Room
Speaking of sandboxes, Rec Room reports that one million+ VR players logged in on and following Christmas Day. The game continues to hit milestones (beyond VR, due to cross-device support), including $145 million in new funding last week.
Wanted to add some @recroom numbers to all the VR excitement
—
We’ve seen over 1 million VR players log into Rec Room since Christmas day. It took us about 60 hours to hit that number 🤯
- Shawn (@ShawnRecRoom) December 27, 2021
Critical Mass
Back to Zuckerberg’s 10-million unit target, why is this the magic number? As he explains, this is the critical mass of users that can germinate a robust content ecosystem. It kicks off a virtuous cycle by incentivizing developers to spend time and money developing for a given platform.
In other words, an eight-figure installed base presents financial incentive for developers to flock to a platform to meet demand. That engenders greater content libraries that attract more users, which in turn attract more developers, and the self-propelled flywheel spins…
Or as Zuckerberg has said in the past:
“The big question is what is it going to take for it to be profitable for all developers to build these large efforts for VR? To get to that level, we think that we need about 10 million people on a given platform. That’s the threshold where the number of people using and buying VR content makes it sustainable and profitable for all kinds of developers. And once we get across this threshold, we think that the content and the ecosystem are just going to explode. Importantly, this threshold isn’t 10 million people across all different types of VR. Because if you build a game for Rift, it doesn’t necessarily work on Go or PlayStation VR. So we need 10 million people on [one] platform.”
This process is happening naturally as Meta’s hardware base grows. But it’s also something that it continues to accelerate through heavy investment. Though it could hit the 10-million mark in a matter of months or weeks, many more usage and sales milestones loom in the coming years.
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https://medium.com/media/1e1f2ee7654748bb938735cbca6f0fd3/href5 Signs of Quest 2’s Holiday Surge was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.