The 20 Best Rated & Most Popular Quest Games & Apps – August 2021

By
Ben Lang
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Most Popular Free Oculus Quest Apps

One way to look at the most popular apps on the Quest store is to see which are earning the most reviews over a certain period of time. The ranking below shows which games saw the most reviews since our last check.

Rank Name Change in Ratings
#1 Rec Room +484
#2 VRChat +476
#3 PokerStars VR +405
#4 FitXR — Box, Dance and HIIT Fitness* +363
#5 Supernatural* +248
#6 Echo VR +126
#7 vSpatial +103
#8 Oculus TV +89
#9 Bigscreen Beta +76
#10 Poker VR – Multi Table Tournaments +60
#11 Oculus Browser +52
#12 Epic Roller Coasters +42
#13 Bait! +39
#14 Netflix +37
#15 The Under Presents +30
#16 Spatial +30
#17 Elixir +29
#18 YouTube VR +29
#19 Venues (Beta Early Access) +28
#20 Immersed +26

Rating change compared to July 2021

  • Among the 20 most popular free Quest apps
    • Median number of new ratings : 56 (+8)
  • Among all free Quest apps
    • Median number of new ratings: 17 (+1)

* free trial followed by paid subscription
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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Christian Schildwaechter

    First of all, thanks for the effort, because it really help to understand where (mobile) VR is going.

    And second, a small meta analysis about the development of sales for the last year, for which you provided monthly comparisons. This covers all the months after the release of the Quest 2 in 2020-10-13.

    Monthly change in median new ratings for the top 20 payed apps:
    2020-11 +93
    2020-12 +307
    2021-01 +480
    2021-02 +385
    2021-03 -25
    2021-04 -82
    2021-05 +50
    2021-06 +39
    2021-07 +29
    2021-08 -118

    I wlll assume that the number of reviews is sort of stable in relation to sales. Be aware that these are the number of reviews, not the reviews ratings, and it is the median, not the average. So a negative number doesn’t mean users were lost or ratings got worse. Instead it most likely indicates that a new game made it into the top 20 and pushed out an older title with more total ratings, e.g. Stride and Warplanes: WW1 Fighters in August.

    New ratings can either come from new users buying any titles, or existing users buying titles they don’t already own, which will often mean new releases. So this represents a mix of Quest sales and VR game releases, but new Quest owners will most likely buy a similar amount of games, only delayed. And with the Top 20 dominated by older titles like Beat Saber, Superhot VR or Gorn, the changes will mostly represent new sales of Quest 2.

    So this looks like an initial rush to buy games after the Quest 2 release and the following holiday season, and then a rather sharp cool down. Even if not everyone could fine a Quest 2 to give as a Christmas present, by end of January 2021 all the delayed gifts should have arrived, and it is a bad sign that the numbers drop so shortly after that. This indicates not only that the Quest sales numbers fell significantly, but also that most people either only play a few games all the time, or, more likely, largely stop playing in VR.

    This means user retention on Quest is still very bad, and future software releases cannot necessarily count on sales to users that bought their Quest half a year ago. We recently got the first somewhat solid numbers with the 4M units sold in the US mentioned in the face pad recall, with estimates between 5M and 8M globally. We will have to also look at how many of these are still in active use.

    • benz145

      Good input, though there’s a lot of variables at play. Here’s some more data just for you that might help the assessment:
      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/869060b37ac1ede25fc36d25f0baf80484fa510ced614d371cf0b08b98af2209.png

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Yeah, the problem with extracting information from fuzzy data is realizing at which point the accumulated error becomes so large that one has passed into pure speculation territory.

        The graph is kind of depressing. I assumed the peak in January/February was caused by Gorn, which after a short check seems to be responsible for just about 1/6th of the new reviews, and about 40% of all Gorn reviews are from the first month. I would have expected a lot more spikes, as people wait for and then buy new releases. There obviously are spikes, but their impact is smaller. I’m usually not exactly overly optimistic about the VR market, but still expected the numbers to be better. With the current “steady” development it will be very difficult to convince larger studios to invest.

        [I haven’t seen the raw data, but it looks like the graph shows data not sampled daily, but at several distinct, not necessarily regular dates, with the values averaged over the period. Using a line chart for this type of data makes it look like there is a steady increase/decrease between to data points, which isn’t really the case, e.g. there was no sudden peak on February 1st. A bar chart is usually recommended when showing accumulated values.]

        • benz145

          You’re right about the graph being sampled data, each join in the line is a sample.

          The line graph should be fairly accurate (and a bar graph should read essentially the same way) in this case because the number of reviews since the last sample is divided by the number of days since the last sample. More data points would show finer changes, but the overall trend is accurately represented AFAIK.

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