The standalone VR market is continuing to grow, and with it, we’re increasingly seeing platform competition for quality content. Pico made its biggest push into consumer VR so far with the launch of the Pico 4 last year, and the company has been gaining ground on getting top VR content onto its store.
Top Quest Apps Showing up on Pico 4
Looking at the 20 best-rated apps on the Quest store (data as of April 2023), to date 70% of the list is available on Pico’s standalone headset:
Title
Pico 4
Quest 2
Moss: Book II
The Room VR: A Dark Matter
Puzzling Places
Walkabout Mini Golf
I Expect You To Die 2
Breachers
COMPOUND
Vermillion
Swarm
DYSCHRONIA: Chronos Alternate
PatchWorld – Make Music Worlds
I Expect You To Die
Moss
Red Matter 2
ARK and ADE
Ragnarock
Cubism
Ancient Dungeon
Into the Radius
The Last Clockwinder
Another way of looking at Pico’s content traction is by the 20 most-rated apps on the Quest store. Breaking it down that way (data as of April 2023), 50% of the list is now available on Pico.
Title
Pico 4
Quest 2
Beat Saber
Blade & Sorcery: Nomad
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners
SUPERHOT VR
GOLF+
BONELAB
Vader Immortal: Episode I
Onward
Job Simulator
The Room VR: A Dark Matter
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted
Resident Evil 4
The Thrill of the Fight
Walkabout Mini Golf
Pistol Whip
Eleven Table Tennis
GORN
Virtual Desktop
Vader Immortal: Episode III
A Township Tale
Building good VR hardware is really just half the battle when it comes to being a serious player in the industry. The other half is getting compelling content onto the headset.
While Quest 2 still has a considerably larger library of apps and several big standalone exclusives (like Beat Saber) Pico looks to be doing a pretty good job so far in its push to legitimize its platform by making sure that some of the top VR content is available for its customers.
And there’s likely more to come. The company has yet to launch its latest Pico 4 headset in the US, which is a major VR market of both customers and developers. Without the US market in play, there’s less incentive for VR developers to bring their apps to Pico. But if Pico finally launches its headset in the US, it could be the nudge needed for more top VR content to make the leap to the store.
Special thanks to @CkYLee for helping to title availability on the Pico store
Having been exclusively building VR games since 2013, nDreams stands as one of the most veteran VR-exclusive game studios to date. And with more than 200 people, one of the largest too. The studio’s CEO & founder, Patrick O’Luanaigh, continues to bet his company’s future on the success of VR.
Speaking exclusively to Road to VR ahead of a presentation at GDC 2023, Patrick O’Luanaigh talks about the growing success of nDreams and why he’s still doubling down on VR.
Starting in 2013, O’Luanaigh has navigated his company from the earliest days of the modern VR era to now, which he believes is VR’s biggest moment so far—and growing.
Between the company’s own internal data and some external sources, O’Luanaigh estimates that VR’s install base is around 40 million headsets across the major platforms, excluding the recently launched PSVR 2. At least half of that, he estimates, is made up by 20 million Quest headsets.
That’s why he’s bulked up the company to some 200 employees, nearly doubling over the course of 2022 through hiring and studio acquisitions.
O’Luanaigh says, “this is the biggest we’ve ever been and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. […] In a decade of exclusively making VR games, we’ve never seen that growth before.”
O’Luanaigh knows well that content is key for getting players into their headsets, and to that end his efforts to scale the company are about building bigger and better VR content to keep up with the growth and expectations of the install base, he says.
“Setting up our fully-remote nDreams studios, Orbital and Elevation, was significant for us in establishing a powerful basis for developing multiple projects in parallel,” he says. “It gives us the specialism to develop the variety of VR titles, across multiple genres, that the growing market now demands.”
O’Luanaigh points to nDreams developed and published titles Phantom: Covert Ops (2020), Shooty Fruity (2020), Fracked (2021), and Little Cities (2022) as some of the most successful VR games the studio has launched thus far, with Phantom: Covert Ops specifically finding “important commercial success” on Quest 2.
With the release of those titles over the years and their ongoing sales, O’Luanaigh shares that nDreams doubled its year-over-year revenue over the last 12 months. And with multiple new projects in the works, including Synapse, Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord, and other (unannounced) projects, he believes the company is on track to more than double annual revenue again by 2024.
Phantom: Covert Ops | Image courtesy nDreams
Though he’s leading a company of 200 employees, O’Luanaigh calls himself a “massive VR enthusiast,” and is still very clearly in touch with makes VR such a unique and compelling medium.
He says his studio aims to build around five key pillars that make for compelling VR content:
Aspirational roleplay – first-person embodiment of appealing roles or characters
High-agency interaction – tactile 1:1 mechanics in a freely explorable world
Empowering wielding – Feel, hold, and use visceral weapons, tools, and abilities
Emotional amplification – Immersive situations that provoke strong, diverse feelings
Fictional teleportation – Presence within desirable locations, inaccessible in real life
And while O’Luanaigh could easily steer this studio away from VR—to chase a larger non-VR market—he continues to double down on VR as the studio’s unique advantage. Far from moving away from VR, his company is actively trying to bring others into the fold; O’Luanaigh says nDreams continues to expand its publishing operations.
“The success of Little Cities, which has just launched its free ‘Little Citizens’ update, has been a great validation of our investments into third-party publishing and we are actively on the lookout for more amazing indie developers to work with.”
With the scale that VR has now reached, O’Luanaigh believes the market is truly viable for indie developers. And that’s why he’s glad to see the rise of VR publishers (and not just his own company); having the benefit of longstanding expertise in the medium is crucial to shipping a shipping a quality VR title, and that’s why O’Luanaigh believes VR-specific publishers like nDreams will play an important role in bringing more developers and great content to VR.
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That expertise is increasingly building upon itself in the company’s VR games which have shown impressive mechanical exploration, giving the studio the chance to test lots of VR gameplay to find out what works.
Few in VR have had the gall to prove out something as seemingly wacky as a ‘VR kayak shooter’ and actually take it to market in a large scale production like Phantom: Covert Ops. And you can clearly see the lineage of a game like nDreams’ Fracked shining through in upcoming titles like Synapse. Though the game is an entirely new IP and visual direction, the unique Fracked cover system is making the leap to Synapse; a clear example of leveraging a now battle-tested mechanic to enhance future titles. But more than just a reskin of a prior shooter, nDreams continues to experiment with unique VR mechanics, this time promising to harness the power of PSVR 2’s eye-tracking to give players compelling telekinetic powers.
Synapse | Image courtesy nDreams
To that end, the studio’s lengthy experience in the medium is clearly an asset—and one that can only be earned rather than bought. Where exactly that experience will take them in the long run is unclear, but even after all the ups and downs the industry has seen, O’Luanaigh and nDreams remain all-in on VR.
Meta has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets, but the company continues to struggle with keeping customer using VR.
According to a report by The Verge, citing an internal Meta presentation held today, the company has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets. This likely includes Quest 1, Quest 2, and Quest Pro, though by all accounts Quest 2 appears to be the vast majority. And while the figure wasn’t publicly announced, this would be the first official confirmation of Quest unit sales from the company.
This info was shared by Mark Rabkin, Meta’s VP of VR, during an internal presentation to “thousands” of employees, according to The Verge.
And while the 20 million unit Quest sales figure is impressive—and well beyond any other single VR headset maker—Rabkin went on to stress that the company has to do a better job at keeping customers using the headsets well after their purchase.
“We need to be better at growth and retention and resurrection,” he said. “We need to be better at social and actually make those things more reliable, more intuitive so people can count on it.”
Curiously, Meta’s latest wave of headset customers are less enthusiastic than those that bought in early.
“Right now, we’re on our third year of Quest 2,” Rabkin said, according to The Verge. “And sadly, the newer cohorts that are coming in—the people who bought it this last Christmas—they’re just not as into it [or engaged as] the ones who bought it early.”
The report from The Verge includes more info about the company’s XR roadmap, which you can read in full here.
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual games & apps are performing across its Quest 2 storefront, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the 20 best rated Oculus Quest games and apps as of June 2022.
Some quick qualifications before we get to the data:
Paid and free apps are separated
Only apps with more than 100 reviews are represented
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual games & apps are performing across its Quest 2 storefront, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the 20 best rated Oculus Quest games and apps as of June 2022.
Some quick qualifications before we get to the data:
Paid and free apps are separated
Only apps with more than 100 reviews are represented
Road to VR co-founder Ben Lang recently joined the crew of the Between Realities podcast.
Bringing more than a decade of experience in the XR industry as co-founder of Road to VR, Ben Lang joined hosts Alex VR and Skeeva on Season 5 Episode 15 of the Between Realities podcast. The trio spoke about the impetus for founding the publication, Meta’s first retail store, the state of competition in the XR industry, privacy concerns for the metaverse, and even some musing on simulation theory. You can check out the full episode below or in the Between Realities episode feed on your favorite podcast platform.
In the podcast Lang speaks of a recent article about scientists that believe it’s possible to experimentally test simulation theory, which you can find here.
While Oculus doesn’t offer much publicly in the way of understanding how well individual games & apps are performing across its Quest 2 storefront, it’s possible to glean some insight by looking at apps relative to each other. Here’s a snapshot of the 20 best rated Oculus Quest games and apps as of May 2022.
Some quick qualifications before we get to the data:
Paid and free apps are separated
Only apps with more than 100 reviews are represented
Speaking at the IEDM conference late last year, Meta Reality Labs’ Chief Scientist Michael Abrash laid out the company’s analysis of how contemporary compute architectures will need to evolve to make possible the AR glasses of our sci-fi conceptualizations.
While there’s some AR ‘glasses’ on the market today, none of them are truly the size of a normal pair of glasses (even a bulky pair). The best AR headsets available today—the likes of HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 2—are still closer to goggles than glasses and are too heavy to be worn all day (not to mention the looks you’d get from the crowd).
If we’re going to build AR glasses that are truly glasses-sized, with all-day battery life and the features needed for compelling AR experiences, it’s going to take require a “range of radical improvements—and in some cases paradigm shifts—in both hardware […] and software,” says Michael Abrash, Chief Scientist at Reality Labs, Meta’s XR organization.
That is to say: Meta doesn’t believe that its current technology—or anyone’s for that matter—is capable of delivering those sci-fi glasses that every AR concept video envisions.
But, the company thinks it knows where things need to head in order for that to happen.
The core reason to rethink how computing should be handled on these devices comes from a need to drastically reduce power consumption to meet battery life and heat requirements.
“How can we improve the power efficiency [of mobile computing devices] radically by a factor of 100 or even 1,000?” he asks. “That will require a deep system-level rethinking of the full stack, with end-to-end co-design of hardware and software. And the place to start that rethinking is by looking at where power is going today.”
To that end, Abrash laid out a graph comparing the power consumption of low-level computing operations.
Image courtesy Meta
As the chart highlights, the most energy intensive computing operations are in data transfer. And that doesn’t mean just wireless data transfer, but even transferring data from one chip inside the device to another. What’s more, the chart uses a logarithmic scale; according to the chart, transferring data to RAM uses 12,000 times the power of the base unit (which in this case is adding two numbers together).
Bringing it all together, the circular graphs on the right show that techniques essential to AR—SLAM and hand-tracking—use most of their power simply moving data to and from RAM.
“Clearly, for low power applications [such as in lightweight AR glasses], it is critical to reduce the amount of data transfer as much as possible,” says Abrash.
To make that happen, he says a new compute architecture will be required which—rather than shuffling large quantities of data between centralized computing hubs—more broadly distributes the computing operations across the system in order to minimize wasteful data transfer.
Compute Where You Least Expect It
A starting point for a distributed computing architecture, Abrash says, could begin with the many cameras that AR glasses need for sensing the world around the user. This would involve doing some preliminary computation on the camera sensor itself before sending only the most vital data across power hungry data transfer lanes.
Image courtesy Meta
To make that possible Abrash says it’ll take co-designed hardware and software, such that the hardware is designed with a specific algorithm in mind that is essentially hardwired into the camera sensor itself—allowing some operations to be taken care of before any data even leaves the sensor.
Image courtesy Meta
“The combination of requirements for lowest power, best requirements, and smallest possible form-factor, make XR sensors the new frontier in the image sensor industry,” Abrash says.
Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call CEO Mark Zuckerberg told shareholders that they should buckle up for the long haul because the company’s steep investments in XR and metaverse technologies aren’t expected to flourish until the next decade.
Today Meta gave its shareholders a quarterly update, in which the company overviewed its latest earnings and expenses.
For Reality Labs, the company’s XR and metaverse division, revenue was up 30% year-over-year, from $534 million in Q1 2021 to $695 million in Q1 2022.
However, costs associated with running the Reality Labs division rose even more, up by 62% year-over-year, from $1.83 billion in Q1 2021 to $2.96 billion in Q2 2022.
This growth in costs wasn’t unexpected. Meta told investors last year they should expect the company’s XR investments in 2021 to total $10 billion… and to grow even more from there.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been asking for investor patience in his vision for XR and metaverse technologies for years. Back in 2017 he was already prepping investors for a long haul, saying that in order to reach mainstream tracition, XR would need a 10 year trajectory from the year the company acquired Oculus—a timeline that pushed out to 2024.
But in Zuckerberg’s eyes that timeline may have slipped considerably.
Today during Meta’s Q1 2022 earnings call, during a lengthy, unscripted response to a shareholder question, Zuckerberg said that he didn’t expect the company’s metaverse and XR investments to really flourish until the 2030s.
So we have multiple teams in parallel that we’ve sort of now spun up [to build XR and metaverse tech]. This goes for VR as well as augmented reality and the other work that we’re doing and is sort of driven by the success that we feel like we’re seeing in the markets and the technology is starting to be ready to really ramp up.
So those [operating losses for Reality Labs], we’re experiencing today. I mean, having those teams operating is something that you see weigh on the results and is one of the reasons why I think the growth rates and expenses have been so high, and I think we’ll continue investing more over some period. But at some point, we will have all those product teams fully staffed for a few versions into the future and then the growth rates there will come down.
But it’s not going to be until those products really hit the market and scale in a meaningful way and this market ends up being big that this will be a big revenue or profit contributor to the business. So that’s why I’ve given the color on past calls that I expect [substantial revenue from Reality Labs] to be later this decade, right?
Maybe primarily, this is laying the groundwork for what I expect to be a very exciting 2030s when this is like—when this is sort of more established as the primary computing platform at that point. I think that there will be results along the way for that, too. But I do think that this is going to be a longer cycle.
To be fair, the company’s initial ’10 year trajectory’ included only a vague idea of the metaverse—something that, despite still being somewhat nebulous—has come into clearer focus in the eight years since Meta acquired Oculus and set out to build ‘the next computing platform’.
Meta arguably didn’t take its first stab at trying to figure out what the metaverse might look like until 2016 when it began seriously experimenting with social VR in what would ultimately become Facebook Spaces, the company’s first social VR app which launched in 2017.
Even so, progress has been slow. Facebook Spaces was shut down in 2019, to be superseded by Horizon. But Horizon—which was first announced in 2019—didn’t launch until the far end 2021… and it’s still only available to a limited audience.
For shareholders seeing Meta spend $2–$3 billion on Reality Labs per quarter… it makes sense why the company is being regularly questioned about its steep spending. Zuckerberg’s suggestion that the investments won’t really flourish until the 2030s surely isn’t going to help matters.
To that end, Zuckerberg said during the earnings call that the company’s plan is to use revenue from its non-XR businesses (Facebook, Instagram, and the like) to fund its aggressive and forward-looking spending. For investors to stick around for the long haul, Zuckerberg is going to need to continue to emphatically sell his belief that XR is the next computing platform and explain why shareholders should stick around for the ride.
Alongside the announcement of the company’s first retail store, Meta has begun redirecting visitors of the longstanding Oculus.com website to its new Meta Store.
Facebook announced back in late 2021 that it would rebrand itself to Meta and eventually dissolve the Oculus brand. In 2022 the company has steadily taken steps to make this a reality, including rebranding its flagship VR headset, Oculus Quest 2, as Meta Quest 2. The company has also pushed the Meta Quest brand elsewhere by replacing the Oculus logo in various places.
The Oculus logo and type under Facebook
But one steadfast holdout was Oculus.com, the URL of company’s front-facing VR division for many years, which housed the storefront for the company to sell headsets along with its VR app catalogue. Even after the site’s content had fully moved to Meta Quest branding, the URL still read Oculus.com.
Today Meta continued its move to erase the Oculus brand; if you visit Oculus.com you’ll now be redirected to store.facebook.com/quest. The new site is a unified storefront for all of Meta’s hardware products, which right now is just Quest, Portal, and Ray-Ban Stories.
Meta must have been in a rush to make the switch, as it oddly dropped Oculus.com URL in favor of a Facebook.com URL (instead of a Meta.com, which the company appears to control).
A large portion of the VR community were blindsided by Meta’s decision to dissolve the Oculus brand which has held very positive sentiment despite the growing unpopularity of the Facebook brand which owned it (prior to the change to Meta). The brand was so iconic that it’s still common to see people refer to any of the company’s headsets as ‘the Oculus’.
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who was booted from the company back in 2017, suggested that Meta should have embraced the Oculus name even more deeply, rather than dissolve it.
“If anything, they should have renamed the whole company Oculus [instead of Meta]. It isn’t just the best brand in their stable, it is one of the most positively associated brands in existence,” Luckey said recently on Twitter. “Not even Quest branding will survive in the long run. It will all be replaced by Meta.”
For execs at Meta, however, the move makes sense. The company has made a big pivot toward focusing on the metaverse and wanted to point its hardware and software in that direction in a unified way. Instead of Oculus Quest, Facebook Horizon, and Facebook Portal, now it’s Meta Quest, Meta Horizon, and Meta Portal.
Only time will tell if the branding move was the right choice—or even if it really matters at all—but the general sentiment among XR industry & enthusiast folks is that the Oculus brand was liked and will be missed.
But Oculus.com isn’t completely dead. Not yet, anyway. Although Oculus.com now redirects to a Facebook.com URL, the Oculus.com domain still houses the company’s entire VR app catalogue and its VR developer resources; meanwhile, the Quest companion smartphone app, which is required to use the headset, is still called ‘Oculus’. Though it seems likely these too will be retired in favor of Meta branding before the year is out.
