How well did Meta Quest do this Christmas? I’ve collected the first indicators that are circulating online.
Meta Quest 2 was very popular in the 2021 holiday season, and there were signs of good sales in 2022, too. But what about 2023?
The price of Quest 2 was reduced to 250 US dollars before Christmas and the Quest 3, which was released in October and cost twice as much, delighted enthusiasts.
In November, Amazon sales figures suggested that Quest 2 was selling about twice as well as Quest 3 – a respectable ratio given the price difference. And during UK’s Black Friday, VR had its strongest revenue week yet.
I have collected several other indicators of sales success that relate to Christmas.
As in previous years, the iOS app Meta Quest made it to the top of the most downloaded free apps in the App Store for Christmas and stayed there for several days. The Meta Quest app must be installed on the smartphone before the Quest can be used.
Since the launch of Meta Quest 3, Brink Traveler has seen a fourfold increase in new daily users, and this success increased tenfold over Christmas. The user spike was even bigger than last Christmas, writes developer Akin Bilgic on Twitter.
The currently most played VR game reached more than 90,000 concurrent users over Christmas, 2.5 times more than before. It is unclear if this statistic includes the PC VR version. However, most of them are probably playing Meta Quest.
In December 2023, Meta Quest 3 was the 4th most used SteamVR headset, just behind the Oculus Rift S. Its share increased by 5% in November and by 4% in December. The SteamVR stats only include headsets used on a PC and with Steam, which is a small fraction of the headsets in circulation.
Twitter user JustDaven pointed out with a screenshot that more than 400,000 users have tried Meta’s mixed reality demo First Encounters. The app does not launch automatically. Depending on how many users actually tried the app, the actual number of users could be higher.
The subreddits /oculus and /oculusquest also saw an increase in subscriber numbers at Christmas, albeit a bit less than in previous years.
Meta’s next quarterly report, expected in late January or early February, will provide a more concrete assessment of sales success compared to previous years as Meta breaks out Meta Reality Labs revenue for every quarter.
Source: Mixed News
