Meta: Over $2 Billion Spent On Quest Content, Monthly Headset Usage Up 30%
Meta says over $2 billion has been spent on Quest content to date, and monthly headset usage increased 30% in 2024.
Meta says over $2 billion has been spent on Quest content to date, and monthly headset usage increased 30% in 2024.
The figures were revealed today at a GDC 2025 talk by Meta's Director of Games Chris Pruett. Meta Reality Labs, the company's hardware and metaverse division, has brought in a total of $9 billion since Quest 2 launched, suggesting that over 80% of its revenue has come from hardware and other services, with less than 20% coming from content revenue.
Meta has given a total store spend figure twice in the past. In February 2022 the company said over $1 billion had been spent on the Quest Store, and in October 2022 it said this figure had surpassed $1.5 billion.
The revelation of headset usage per month increasing by 30% in 2024 follows Pruett's announcement at last year's GDC that Quest 3 has higher retention than previous Meta headsets.
"The number of people who own and are actively using a headset is larger than it has ever been", Pruett told the audience.
Henry Stockdale
While total platform spending increased 12% in 2024, a figure Meta previously gave in response to developer concerns, the type of spending and type of content bringing in revenue significantly changed.
Last month Meta revealed that free-to-play apps now account for 70% of time spent on Quest, with Pruett acknowledging that this has come with a reduction in spending for some paid titles. However, he notes that the majority of revenue still comes from paid titles.
While some of the shift is specific to VR/MR, Pruett noted that it mirrors wider trends across the games industry, where "spending is flat, investment has dried up, the only games that seem to be doing very well are big live service titles and indie darlings".
As for Quest specifically, Pruett said that the launch of Quest 3S "signaled a larger audience shift than we expected". Quest 3S buyers are younger on average, he explained, with not as much disposable income as previous Quest headset buyers. While teenager buyers have been growing with every headset release, with Quest 3S they now represent the majority of both buyers and active users, he revealed.
These teenage Quest users, he explains, "want to play the same sorts of games they’re playing elsewhere", primarily free-to-play titles with a strong focus on social interaction such as Gorilla Tag and paid "meme games" such as I Am Cat.
Further, a new audience of mainstream adult Quest buyers have emerged that aren't as interested in immersive VR or mixed reality apps at all, seeing their headset "as an extension of their TV—a device primarily for media consumption".
"They like sports, action movies, concerts—all kinds of stuff. They also play games on their phones or consoles, but it’s a secondary pastime."
Henry Stockdale
According to Pruett it is this shift, and not the opening of the store or focus on Horizon Worlds, that is responsible for the vast majority of the reduction of revenue that some developers who had been targeting VR enthusiast buyers have been reporting.
He said that as Meta opened the store, it tested the change by exposing different users “to the old view and the new view”, and after months of tracking the results found a less than 1% difference in spending. He says Meta ran the same experiment for its heavy promotion of Horizon Worlds in the phone app and found it decreased spending "by 3% at most". Overall, neither of these changes lead to a reduction in overall spending, with it in fact rising by 12% in 2024.
Most VR enthusiasts come to the store already knowing what they want to buy anyways, Pruett claimed, and thus these changes didn't much affect them.
"We realize that 2024 had a lot of change all at once. We spent a long time unpacking and untangling the impact of these changes because it’s easy to conflate correlation with causation. The research isn’t done yet—we’re still learning and fine-tuning. For example, our store ranking algorithm has changed significantly several times over the last 12 months. It’s an ongoing project, and we don’t always get it right. Luckily, the data tells us pretty clearly when we’ve made mistakes so we can course correct."
