bonelab — Bonelab | Image courtesy Stress Level Zero

‘Bonelab’ Made $1M in First Hour on Quest, Setting Record as Fastest Selling Game on Platform

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Oct 13, 2022

At its annual Connect developer conference this week Meta revealed that Stress Level Zero’s Quest 2 game Bonelab (2022) made its first $1 million in revenue less than an hour after launch, making it the fastest-selling app in Quest history.

Released late last month, Bonelab capitalizes on the physics-based fun of Stress Level Zero’s popular PC VR action-adventure game, Boneworks (2019).

As a sandbox game designed from the ground-up for Quest, Bonelab was uniquely positioned to give standalone headset users their first taste of the engine behind a host of memes. You know, the brutal and cartoonish violence that fuels stuff like Deadpool swinging around with Spider-Man skillz and 360 no-scoping an innocent NPC into oblivion.

On Quest, Bonelab has already broken 8,000 reviews on the Meta Quest Store, giving it a aggregate user score of [4.58/5] stars. Bonelab also launched on PC VR headsets too, garnering a ‘Mostly Positive’ user rating from over 6,000 players on Steam.

Meta Now Requires Mandatory Age Confirmation on Quest Headsets

In a larger info dump, Meta also revealed there were a few other games were raring to compete against Bonelab. In its first 24 hours, Armature Studio’s VR refresh of classic horror-shooter Resident Evil 4 (2021) broke $2 million in revenue on Quest.

Ramen VR broke the $1 million revenue mark on Quest in just 24 hours for its MMORPG Zenith: The Last City (2022).

WarpFrog’s Blade & Sorcery: Nomad (2021), the Quest 2 adaptation of its PC VR title, made its first $1 million in just two days.

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This was a really disappointing game, shame after all the time.
wheeler

I wonder how this compares to PCVR. The number of reviews on both platforms are strikingly close given the larger target market of standalones. Doubt they’ll let that stat slip though.
- ViRGiN
  
  PCVR already dropped to 10% of it’s player base, at least on steam.
  On Quest it’s still #1 top seller.
  - Cless
    
    I mean… yeah, if it was a PCVR port to the Quest it would have fared way better. But Quest to PCVR ports tend to be kind of shit. Can’t speak for this one since I haven’t tried it, but from what I’ve read/seen, I’m quite sure that’s what happening.
    - ViRGiN
      
      It looks no worse than PCVR exclusive Boneworks.
      Even that team who made flight arcade game designed it for PCVR and then ported to Quest 2; still PCVR sales were almost non-existent compared to Quest 2.
      There is no way to satisfy PCVR players. Every developer is better off making extremely small minigames – higher chance they will get accepted by players, like Gorilla Tag
      - Cless
        
        Yes indeed. The reason why PCVR players won’t be happy is because PC is so much more powerful, so needs bigger teams to have proper games, which means bigger budgets… And that doesn’t happen everyday.
      - neodraig
        
        Compared to games like Half-Life Alyx, Lone Echo (and many others) Boneworks didn’t looked really great for a PCVR game to start with, and Bonelab looks even worse (low rez textures, simplier models) due to its primary development for the Quest.
        For me it just looks like another one of those VR games created without efforts to make easy money, like saddly too many on the Quest, and it’s just the plain truth.
        
        I know for sure, after reading that you’ll get on you high horse, as a knight whose mission is to protect at all costs the spendor of the Quest, which is apparently in your eyes the ultimate wonder of the world
        Reading at you comments, you really seem like a fanatic which gets crazy each time someone dares criticizes the Quest and the worse part is you are always trying to demean PCVR each time you get the chance, no wonder you always get downvoted.
      - ViRGiN
        
        > it’s the game itself which sucks
        yup. it’s always the case. it’s never the “downgraded” graphics on the quest. if something sucks, it sucks, but it sucks less when it’s running on mobile because it is a mobile platform. no need to get defensive and snarky – player stats are publicly available. hundreds of millions of pcvr-capable pc are not interested in joining pcvr at all. 6 years passed and its still no different.
      - pasfish111
        
        No, we all have stopped playing in VR because Meta killed with their billions of $ and their lust of user-data our loved hobby! ;-) Why the hack should we pay and play VR Games on our systems that could run also on our phones???.
        It’s like buying a Porsche with a 30km/h limit. That’s why no PCVR Gamer is interested in new mobile VR games ;-) … I can’t tell you a single interesting/great VR Title in the last 2 years (since mobile VR took over) :-/
      - ViRGiN
        
        LMAO so what games have you stopped playing after Meta poured billions to make even SteamVR a somewhat populated area?
        You can’t name even any pre-Quest era games. Bet you played superhot and job simulator, and suddenly with quest release, these games were no longer cutting edge lol.
        
        PCVR games have ALWAYS been mobile games running unoptimized code on PCs that could handle cyberpunk and modern warfare, AT ONCE.
      - Daven Bigelow
        
        You do realize BoneLab looks better on Quest native than Boneworks on PC did right?
      - pasfish111
        
        Sorry, BoneLab doesn’t look better on the Quest 2 as Boneworks did 3,5 years ago on PC! The funny thing is, that Boneworks was already 3,5 years ago very ugly for PCVR Games! … Modern PC have 30x more GPU Power than the Quest 2. Please don’t start to compare those systems! Our Games look only because of your Quest, not 10x better! …that’s why we all have stopped playing in VR! – and we hate Meta and their friends for that ;-)
      - ViRGiN
        
        All you’re really saying is that PCVR sucks, and Quest 2 doesn’t have PC power. Cool story bro.
      - Daven Bigelow
        
        1 Yes it absolutely does
        
        2 True Boneworks does look rough in general
        
        3 Good for your PC, it’s also a great game on Quest :) But of course BoneLab looks better on PC than Quest too, both versions of BoneLab beat Boneworks in the visuals department
        
        4 If you never played on Quest you wouldn’t realize the captures you see are always way worse than it actually looks in the HMD
        
        5 Equally not every port is perfect, some really really over dropped the quality, especially if they are on Quest 1 too (but they are still 100% fun)
        
        6 I went from fully PCVR to mostly standalone, I know what I’m talking about here
      - pasfish111
        
        Why should PCVR Gamer pay and play ugly low poly games without any story? … Give us HL:3, Doom Eternal 2, or Elder scroll 6 in VR, and we are all back and 10x more than before ;-)
        
        Thanks, God! Meta has no success with their mobileVR-data-dreams, the lost 2/3 of its worth in 1,5 years!!!! And mobil Quest fanboys like to tell us it’s a big success :D :D :D :D. The Quest Pro is the next flop, and Sony will give mobile VR hopfully the rest… We are back soon!
      - ViRGiN
        
        LMAO, so you admit there are no good games for PCVR. There is no HL3, there is crappy Alyx designed for handicapped people. There is no Doom Eternal 2, there is Doom VFR with dash-teleport mechanics. There is no elder scrolls 6, there is crappy skyrim that requires 500 mods to be quarter-usable. And yet rec room, beat saber and pavlov conquers the PCVR charts.
        
        Sony isn’t competing with mobile VR LMAO. The release of PSVR2 will not help a tiny bit to the PCVR. Back soon? LMAO heard it for years. Every new technology, every new graphic card was supposed to save it and it never did.
    - Raphael
      
      The game launched for Rift and Quest 2 so if you buy bonelabs on Quest you get the PCVR version as well.
      - Cless
        
        I mean, that is good, it is also unrelated to what I was talking about. When we make games we have a platform target most of the times. If you target weak hardware like the Quest 2 just because that’s where you will make the most money, even when you release on other platforms, your product will suffer, in some cases like this one, greatly.
        I’m happy they still released it for PC though, better than nothing at all.
Runesr2

So the first hour went well – I gave them some cash too.

Question is – how many like me refunded this garbage game during the second hour? :-)
Daven Bigelow

You see more people complaining about this game in social media because everyone else is still having fun playing it

Absolutely love it, played through it entirely on Quest standalone
- ViRGiN
  
  what’s the point of this message?
  - Daven Bigelow
    
    The people hating on Bonelab are a very tiny (but very loud) minority
    - ViRGiN
      
      very loud? that’s just the impression of someone who extremely likes bonelabs.
      for me it’s as shit as bonework was. absolutetly nothing interesting, pure junk with janky mechanics. there is not even a proper way to climb which vr games have done for years prior.
      even pcvr people responded. like i said, 90% of players are gone already.
      - Daven Bigelow
        
        I hated Boneworks and refunded it
        
        BoneLab is just way way better imo
        
        I’d argue Steam charts are always bad for tracking active players
        
        Eg: After The Fall, and even VR Chat these days is more than half on Quest
      - ViRGiN
        
        which only shows absolute demise of anything PCVR. PCVR top charts are almost literally unchanged ever since 2016 consumer headset releases.
      - Daven Bigelow
        
        I agree on this point
- ApocalypseShadow
  
  Maybe they are recognizing average quality when they see it. Sure. It has physics. But it would never pass under normal conditions of game development with poor design decisions and priced more than it’s worth. Under developed story and is buggy.
  
  Reviewers have recognized the games problems. Even though it may be fun to some, it lacks depth that seasoned veteran developers could easily point out. The fact that the developers are looking forward to their game being modded shows it lacks in key areas. Great games typically don’t need modding.
  
  The fact they want to talk revenue which is misleading without context is another check mark under “hype.” Did they make a profit? Did they make their return on investment? How many copies did they sell? Facebook has done this as well talking about Quest game revenue when it’s misleading.
  
  You not recognizing these things, but instead, go after the ones who don’t drink the Kool aid and have seen better VR games, shows a very clear view of bias. For all we know, you could be one of the developers or a friend of the team.
  - NL_VR
    
    It’s simply to say the game is not for everyone.
    I also think Bonelab is a great game, have lots of fun in that game. But I like games that have replayability and mod support because you have litterly unlimited content.
    As a storydriven singleplayer experience it lacks yes.
neodraig

This turd made $1 million in an hour, this just shows how appaling is the VR gaming market at the moment.
Fortunately on PC we have the modding community, I would have given up on VR otherwise. I can’t wait to try Praydog’s universal unreal VR injector and play real games in VR, I had enough of those gimmicky VR games.
- ViRGiN
  
  playing real games in not-real vr lol.
  PCVR never got out of rec room/beat saber phase.
  bonelab already shrunk to 10% of it’s initial player base to a roughly 1000 (2nd highest concurrent number of players ever. 1st was alyx with 40k, 3rd was zenith the last city game which shrunk back to 0.01% of active playerbase from their all time high of 4493 concurrent users.
  - Cless
    
    My dude, you do realize that not everyone in PC is playing “VR” games, right? Like, my time spent on “VR games” is basically 0%, yet I game in VR. You can do so much more with a VR headset in a PC that you can on a console or on a mobile powered CPU
    - ViRGiN
      
      And? This thread is about a VR game, and the dude above is talking about modding flat games for VR. There are only a handful that even make use of proper 6dof controls.
      - Cless
        
        The thing is, that PCVR games aren’t only games of the “VR genre”, like it is on the quest or on console devices, its way more than that.
      - ViRGiN
        
        And nobody cares about that. What are you even attempting to say again?
        I can play emulators on quest. Buy games from external stores. I can run web apps natively. I can even install android apps and use them in vr. So what? You’re acting like for PCVR, vr games are minority and there is a vast amount of people using PCVR for everything but playing vr games.
        
        Maybe the dominant use case is actually reading ebooks on PCVR? You know, with more power, you can upscale rendered text resolution magnitude of times for that sharp and crispy text. It’s a billion dollar market for hands-free reading. You could gesture by tilting head to signalize next page, or have it scroll automatically. You could also glue the ebook to your face so that no matter where you look, you will always be focused on reading. Think about it.
      - Cless
        
        And nobody cares about that.
        
        No, you don’t care about that, which is different. I never said everyone cares about it though, so that point is moot.
        
        My point is more about game genres, and not about “other stuff totally unrelated to games you can do on a VR headset”. I am aware you can do those in mobile hardware or console hardware, you implying that is insulting my intelligence.
        
        You can play emulators on a Quest natively, sure, you CAN’T emulate in VR those emulators though. And by emulating in VR, I’m not talking about emulating a PS1 or GameCube in a flat screen. I’m talking about literally recompiling and emulating the whole game so the game puts you inside the game world like if it was a “native” VR experience that you happen to play with a traditional controller.
        
        You could still do that on a Quest of course, but for that you would need to tether it to a PC, making it into PCVR.
        I would not call that emulated game a “VR genre” game, since it retains all its traditional gameplay. It just happens to be way more inmersive and take advantage of the superior hardware. Same thing for all new and older PC games (though those require some decent PC muscle to pull off).
      - ViRGiN
        
        > you CAN’T emulate in VR those emulators though
        Time to get sent to reeducatment gulag. PPSSPP VR is a PSP emulator for Quest. It renders image in 3D. You control it with controllers. That’s exactly what you mentioned above. It does not require PC.
        
        It’s not like even the PC mods are recompiling the game – most of them are literally DLL hacks, and hence why it won’t even support multiplayer online in many cases – it’s essentially cheating.
        
        See, no matter what, PCVR is not moving forward.
        “on PC we have the modding community, I would have given up on VR otherwise” is the original post, and it’s all about that.
      - Cless
        
        Ok, psp emulator running on quest 2? That’s awesome. But you can’t blame me not knowing it when this Experimental emulator came out barely 2 months ago lol
        Still, pretty amazing they can pull that off with such weak hardware tbh.
        
        And yeah, any editing of any game will cap out the multiplayer. But there is a library of literal thousands of working titles, which is quite cool, you have to admit that.
        
        And yeah, PC gaming in general would be a shadow of what it is if it weren’t for the modding community, this is not a weakness, its a strength.
        
        My points won’t hold true forever though, I hope that by the quest 4, we can get enough performance like we get out of current gen consoles. But right now, they are very limited, just like the first smartphones were. Cool stuff, but needs more power and time to develop further the software
      - ViRGiN
        
        > library of literal thousands of working titles, which is quite cool, you have to admit that.
        I don’t know if it’s in the thousands, but it’s the kind of VR which is only attractive when you realize that native PCVR simply sucks. VorpX supported hundreds of titles since like 2013-2014. Sure, that was a one size fits all type of solution and won’t really match fine-tuned custom dll per game, but it was done years before.
        
        Plus, you can’t play Quake 3 on PCVR :)
- Cless
  
  They aren’t gimmicky, and the other games aren’t more “real”. You, just like me, probably, just don’t enjoy playing “VR” genre of games. 90% of my time in VR is emulating games from the GC/Wii / and playing regular games but in reconstructed 3D, because that’s what I enjoy about VR, not the actual “VR genre”.
gothicvillas

I can guarantee their next game will not sell that well
- ViRGiN
  
  nah, third time the charm. they would even make more money if they put it on kickstarter.
Cockney John

Truly an example of ‘the Emperors new clothes…’
pasfish111

$1M minus a lot of $40 :D …I think most PCVR users have refunded this hyped Quest 2 game after a first look.

Stress Level Zero has nothing learned from Boneworks, because they had too much to do to bring the Game somehow to run on the Qeust 2.

The day when developer can focus again on story, game design and graphics without the Quest 2 always in their mind, will be the best for VR Gaming since 2016 and the breakthrough of VR Gaming!
- ViRGiN
  
  lmao fool, bonelabs on pc had better sales than pcvr exclusive boneworks.
- Daven Bigelow
  
  Nothing was sacrificed to bring the game to Quest 2, they heavily improved the experience and controls
  
  The Quest version has decreased graphics, but go ask the dev on Twitter about it instead of malding in Disqus
DanDei

Just shows you how few games there are on Quest with the ambition to go even a single step beyond the shallow minigames and experiences we have been seeing since 2016. Since there are no more big budget VR games (at least until Sony is finally releasing PSVR2) the market has just shrivelled down to cheap shovelware with mobile graphics. So no wonder gamers are starved for better content and that even a mediocre realization of bigger ambitions gets a lot of attention and buys.
- NL_VR
  
  lol you upset people like the game? many has been wainting for this game .
Alexander Sears

I’m still waiting on a Timesplitters Future Perfect clone.
Raphael

Amazing game.
Raphael

I guess you haven’t really played it then have you. It has a single-player campaign. It has additional game modes that include shooting bots but it has a compelling single player campaign.

It’s unfortunate this game gets trashed by people who can’t get past the 02 HUB and think that’s the entire game.
- Jeff is beck
  
  It sux just deal with it