connect

Coming alongside the big Quest 3 info dump today at Connect 2023, Meta revealed that Quest Store games and apps have generated over $2 billion in revenue. While the store is still earning for developers, looking at revenue over time shows that things have cooled off over the last year.

Meta’s Head of Developer Relations Melissa Brown announced the figure on stage, further noting that 100+ new and upgraded titles are coming to the Quest Store before the year’s end, more than half of which will be brand new games and apps.

While $2 billion sounds like an impressive number—it certainly is for the XR industry at large—it pales in comparison to what Meta regularly spends on its Reality Labs division.

Back in July, the company reported a quarterly loss just south of $4 billion in Q2 2023; Reality Labs’ revenue was down by 39% due to lower Quest 2 sales, making for the worst quarterly performance in the past two years.

With today’s announcement, it’s also clear at what rate content sales have cooled off since Quest 2 was launched in 2020. The company announced at Connect 2022 in October last year that it had topped $1.5 billion in Quest Store revenue, accounting for everything since the first Quest’s launch in 2019, meaning it’s only managed to generate $500 million in the past 12 months, putting a clear end to any kind of take-off ramp that might have appeared to be forming.

Moving forward, this will undoubtedly put more weight on Quest 3 to fill in where Quest 2 left off, as stockholders will no doubt expect the $500 headset to meet or beat its forebear’s relatively meteoric success. Quest 3 pack in much of the functionality of the $1,000 Quest Pro headset, including color passthrough sensors for mixed reality, and has a significantly sleeker profile and more powerful chipset than the now $300 Quest 2.

Will that be enough for first-time VR users to jump in? Enough for Quest 2 users to upgrade? Whatever the case, Meta is undoubtedly subsidizing its XR hardware to make software sales more attractive. And if it doesn’t keep pumping out first-party titles like Asgard’s Wrath 2, they’ll need at least keep those multi-million-dollar success stories coming, like Gorilla Tag’s $26 million in revenue high-swinging success story, or the other 40 Quest games that Meta said had posted revenues over $10 million.

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Connect 2023 kicks off today, taking place September 27th and 28th at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters. There’s been a ton of news already, so make sure to follow along by heading to our main page for all of the latest in Meta’s XR stuff.