Batman: Arkham Shadow (2024) has just topped over 1 million players, evidenced by an in-game achievement that nearly everyone is bound to earn just by booting up the game and playing for a few minutes.

Camouflaj’s Batman: Arkham Shadow, the Quest-exclusive game released last October, was poised to be a big draw for the holiday season last year, prompting Meta to bundle the VR native continuation of the Arkham series with every new Quest 3 and Quest 3S purchase.

Now, as first reported by UploadVR, it seems one of Batman: Arkham Shadow’s easiest achievements has now tallied over 1 million players.

The achievement, called ‘False God’, is activated when a player finds a Rat King Idol, of which there are 40 strewn throughout the game as hidden collectibles.

Image courtesy QuestWithMatt

The first to note that Batman: Arkham Shadow had topped 1 million players was French-language YouTuber ‘QuestWithMatt‘, who also tracks a number of games, including Skydance’s Behemoth (2024) and Metro Awakening (2024).

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According to similar in-game achievements, those games have topped nearly 500,000 players and over 400,000 players respectively.

Interestingly, as charted by QuestWithMatt below, the post Christman boom handily doubled player numbers—historically Meta’s biggest period for headset activations as well as downloads of the Meta Horizon mobile companion app.

Image courtesy QuestWithMatt

It’s really no surprise though that Batman: Arkham Shadow is outperforming its other ‘AAA’ Quest exclusives though, as the game comes bundled with all new Quest owners, effective since just before the game’s October release until April 2025.

Notably, if it weren’t included with every Quest 3S sold to date and Quest 3 purchased after September 2024, Batman: Arkham Shadow would have grossed $50 million, owing to its $50 price tag.

That said, it’s also a fabulous game in its own right, with Batman: Arkham Shadow garnering a ‘Great’ rating in our full review. We especially liked how it captured the essence of the Arkham series by understanding the core formula and deeply adapting it for VR, not to mention its well-executed movement, light puzzles, and innovative VR melee combat. Check out the (spoiler free) review linked above to learn more.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Mateusz Jakubczyk

    "According to similar in-game achievements, those games have topped nearly 500,000 players and over 400,000 players respectively" – no, you're wrong, you added one "zero" too many. Behemoth's first achievement was obtained by 49.6K players on the Meta Store, and Metro by 42.4K. Unfortunately, these games sold very poorly on Quest…

    • Mateusz Jakubczyk

      Anyway, congrats to Camouflaj, they did a really great thing with Batman: Arkham Shadow, I hope they can make a sequel :)

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Out of curiosity I looked up their ratings etc. on the Horizon Store and Steam. (Which then led to some observations regarding rating count vs unit sales):

      Metro Awakening
      Horizon: 1026 ratings, 4.5/5 = 90%
      First achievement: 42.4K
      Achievement/Ratings: 41.3

      Steam: 1848 ratings, Mostly positive = 74%
      Owners: 64,6K [45K-80K SteamDB]
      First achievement: 69.8% ≈ 45K [31K-56K]
      Achievement/Ratings: 24.4 [16.7-30.3]

      Skydance's BEHEMOTH
      Horizon: 1003 ratings, 4.2/5 = 84%
      First achievement: 49.6K
      Achievement/Ratings: 49.5

      Steam: 460 ratings, Mostly positive = 76%
      Owners: 12.2K [9K-17K SteamDB]
      First achievement: 89.9% ≈ 11K [8K-15K]
      Achievement/Ratings: 26.5 [17.4-32.6]

      Numbers in [square brackets] are (based on) the range of estimates from PlayTracker, SteamSpy, Gamalytic and VG Insights listed on SteamDB. The huge variations introduce a big margin of error, the number before them is the average.

      [The rest of this comment is mostly math for comparing sales on the Horizon Store and Steam by looking at and adjusting the review numbers.]

      I compared achievements and ratings because I wanted to now how sales (via achievements) are connected to the number of ratings on both Quest (ratio 41.3 and 49.5) and Steam (24.4 and 26.5), as knowing this would allow to compare how well a game sold relative to the other platform. And despite Metro doing better and Behemoth doing worse on Steam, the ratio of people that got the first achievement to ratings is roughly the same between the two platforms for both games, with Steam users ~1.8 times (1.7 and 1.9) as likely to leave a rating.

      So to compare relative sales numbers between Quest and Steam, you'd have to multiply the reviews on the Horizon store by 1.8. A game with 10K ratings on Quest and 2.5K ratings on Steam would have sold 10*1.8/2.5 = 7.2 times as many copies on Quest.

      These two games don't seem to be particularly representative though. For many VR games the ratings ratio is around 4:1 Quest:Steam, while it is 2.2:1 for Behemoth and 1:1.8 for Metro, so they did worse and horribly worse on Quest compared to most other games available on both platforms. Corrected with the (very likely unrepresentative) ~1.8 factor, Behemoth would have sold about four times as many copies on Quest, while Metro sold roughly same numbers on both platforms. The same ratio as we see between the number of first achievements on Quest and Steam, unsurprising since this is what that factor was derived from.

      • Dragon Marble

        Behemoth and Metro were very unlucky on Quest this holiday season because they got cannibalized by free Batman, free Asgard, and other free Quest+ titles. Hopefully there will still be a delayed wave of purchases once people are done with free games.

        • Mateusz Jakubczyk

          We'll see what the reception of Alien: Rogue Incursion is next week, I hope it proves that AAA titles can still sell well on the Horizon Store :)

  • Azurewrath

    "Notably, if it weren’t included with every Quest 3S sold to date and Quest 3 purchased after September 2024, Batman: Arkham Shadow would have grossed $50 million, owing to its $50 price tag."

    While technically true, it very well likely wouldn't have sold 1 million copies if it wasn't bundled. I wonder how many copies were sold that weren't bundled, but unlikely to ever know.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      We know that USD 60 AW2 dropped out of the monthly sales Top 20 pretty much the moment it was no longer bundled for free with Quest 3, and never showed up there again despite having been significantly reduced during sales since then and being regarded as one of the most impressive Quest games with very long play time compared to other often rather short VR games. And with other paid titles like Metro and Behemoth doing very poorly, and Ubisoft a while ago announcing that sales for the long awaited Assassin's Creed Nexus with great reviews were so disappointing that they will (for now) stop any further VR development, it would probably have required a miracle for Batman: Arkham Shadow to get to even 10% of the 1mn players by now if it hadn't been bundled for free.

  • patfish

    that showed clearly that most Quest users are now little Kids ;-) …who gets their Quest/VR Games directly from Santa :D :D :D …I mean Hohoho!