One of our 2022 predictions – spotlighted in an article last week – is that the Meta Quest 2 will reach its target of 10 million lifetime units sold in 2022. This goal was previously stated by Mark Zuckerberg (more on that in a bit). It now appears that it could hit that milestone even sooner.

Specifically, this 10-million mark will likely come in 2022 as expected, but could be very early in the year. Evidence to that effect comes from holiday sales signals. For one, the Oculus app – used to set up and manage Quest 2 – was the top downloaded iOS app on Christmas weekend.

More evidence comes from app analytics firm Apptopia, which reports that Oculus app installs jumped more than 150 percent year-over-year during Christmas weekend. In absolute numbers (extrapolated estimates), that equates to 650,000 downloads, up from 255,000 in 2020.

This supports projections of our research arm, ARtillery Intelligence, which estimated a considerable Q4 surge in Quest 2 sales. This was informed partly by last year’s holiday sales, gradual demand growth for VR, and Quest 2’s giftable (and aggressive) price point.

2022 Predictions: Quest 2 Hits the 10-Million Mark

Further Evidence

Beyond app store rankings and Apptopia estimates, a few other market signals validate a holiday sales spike for Quest 2. So for this week’s Data Dive, we’ve rounded up five of them. See them below in no particular order (thanks to our friends at Upload for some of the legwork).

1. Golf+

Golf+ – a game we spent time playing on Christmas Day – experienced a notable sales spike, shown below in the difference between 2020 (green line) and 2021 (blue line).

2. Eleven Table Tennis

Speaking of casual sports titles, the popular Eleven Table Tennis has exceeded 1,800 daily players on and following Christmas day. The delta from regular levels can be seen in the chart below.

3. Gorilla Tag

Breakout Oculus App Lab title Gorilla Tag hit 344,000 unique users on December 26 and reached 26,000 concurrent users. Look out for that AWS bill.

4. Hand Physics Lab

Sandbox game Hand Physics Lab also reports a Christmas-day inflection. See the evidence below.

5. Rec Room

Speaking of sandboxes, Rec Room reports that one million+ VR players logged in on and following Christmas Day. The game continues to hit milestones (beyond VR, due to cross-device support), including $145 million in new funding last week.

Critical Mass

Back to Zuckerberg’s 10-million unit target, why is this the magic number? As he explains, this is the critical mass of users that can germinate a robust content ecosystem. It kicks off a virtuous cycle by incentivizing developers to spend time and money developing for a given platform.

In other words, an eight-figure installed base presents financial incentive for developers to flock to a platform to meet demand. That engenders greater content libraries that attract more users, which in turn attract more developers, and the self-propelled flywheel spins…

Or as Zuckerberg has said in the past:

”The big question is what is it going to take for it to be profitable for all developers to build these large efforts for VR? To get to that level, we think that we need about 10 million people on a given platform. That’s the threshold where the number of people using and buying VR content makes it sustainable and profitable for all kinds of developers. And once we get across this threshold, we think that the content and the ecosystem are just going to explode. Importantly, this threshold isn’t 10 million people across all different types of VR. Because if you build a game for Rift, it doesn’t necessarily work on Go or PlayStation VR. So we need 10 million people on [one] platform.”

This process is happening naturally as Meta’s hardware base grows. But it’s also something that it continues to accelerate through heavy investment. Though it could hit the 10-million mark in a matter of months or weeks, many more usage and sales milestones loom in the coming years.

https://youtu.be/Fe9hq73s7Bo

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