A number of VR developers have reported that 2021 is the best holiday season for the industry on record, specifically for Meta’s Quest 2 headset. Virtual reality content and hardware have continued to improve and expand year after year, and the technology found a place under plenty of Christmas trees this year. New installations of the Oculus mobile app jumped more than 150% over the holiday weekend when compared to past years, with over 650,000 people grabbing the software between December 24 to 26. The starting price of the Meta Quest 2 is $300, so the parent company of Oculus and Facebook is seeing a very profitable end to 2021.
The free social VR app Rec Room also saw record numbers over the Christmas weekend, with over 1 million VR players logging into the experience over a 60 hour period. Earlier this year, it took Rec Room an entire month to hit this milestone. Following this massive leap in interest, Rec Room is now hiring for over 60 positions. Developer of Hand Physics Lab Dennys Kuhnert said that sales of the app have been “unprecedented,” while a developer of Golf+ is on record saying that the developers had to “scale up to manage the concurrently connected users” on Christmas Day. Developers of the multiplayer game Gorilla Tag also indicated 344,000 unique users during the holiday weekend, with 26,000 concurrent users.
While other virtual reality products like PSVR have also sold relatively well, Meta’s Quest 2 has been the main force driving VR forward over the past few months. Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to invest $10 billion to build the metaverse, a virtual world he aims to make the standard for social networking, gaming, and work. While this vision will likely take years and years to come to fruition, those with Meta headsets will further provide data used to further understand how typical users interact with virtual reality. Whether this is a good thing or not, well, only time will tell.
