The 20 Best Rated & Most Popular Quest Games & Apps – July 2023

I’m still a big fan of these monthly top 20 charts as they provide the rare opportunity to observe developments in VR over a longer stretch of time, with very few usable sources of data being available. Of course everything is only relative to previous data from the Quest store and doesn’t necessarily match what happens e.g. with PCVR, but the general trends seemed to correlate a lot for a long time, at least until the numbers from the Steam hardware survey startet to jump around in ways no longer explainable by small errors in measurement.

But lately I’m asking myself how distorted this relative view actually is. One problem is the difference between the best rated apps and the apps that added the most new ratings. “Walkabout Mini Golf”, “Golf+” and “Into The Radius” are the only titles that show up in both lists, and the at least somewhat surprising lack of sales of the “best apps” cannot be explained by those being older titles.

The fact that two of the apps on both lists are actually Golf games/simulations also hints that looking at either the apps best rated or adding most reviews doesn’t necessarily paint a picture of “typical” Quest use. A lot of enthusiasts were very astonished when Meta stopped bundling Beat Saber and offered Golf+ instead, but that’s possibly because most enthusiasts aren’t “single app users”. We’ve known for a long time that there are many people that use VR on Quest/PCVR/PSVR pretty much exclusively for Beat Saber, for fun and/or exercise. There is a section of VR users that are only into fitness apps. The “serious” Golfers are another surprisingly large group that don’t care about VR in general, but only use it as the best possible simulation of the sport, with a tiny industry providing specialized accessories such as golf club controller attachment adapters, and Golf+ being #1 or #2 in “most new ratings” for the last year and never below #4.

The train of though was triggered by two numbers: WSJ reporting there were 6.37mn active Quest users in 2022-10, and GorillaTag reporting 2.3mn monthly users in 2023-01, a lot of which seem to play GorillaTag almost exclusively. Just assuming they all only play GorillaTag, more than 1/3rd of all Quest usage would be just GorillaTag. Add x% for those that only play Beat Saber, y% for those that play only Golf and those that only play multiplayer FPS, and we most likely end up with way more than 50% of all Quest users that stick to pretty much one app and never buy new ones.

In early 2022 Meta announced that the Quest store had generated USD 1bn in revenue, at that time split over ~10mn Quest 1/2, meaning on average every Quest lead to USD 100 in software sales, meaning probably 4-6 titles. I know I bought a lot more, so there must be others that bought a lot less or nothing at all. Looking at the active user number has always been interesting because those represent the people that might actually buy software and therefore provide a motivation for developers to create new titles. Now I’m wondering if of these active users more than 20-30% are actively buying users, and if these are pretty much the only ones the monthly top 20 lists represent. And what it means for the average Quest usage that the typical “single use app” Golf+ has been so dominant for more than a year. Given the general low retention of VR, but the highly enthusiastic VR golf community, are there now more people using VR exclusively for Golf than even for Beat Saber?