Wagner James Au / New World Notes

I'm helping develop a VR action game with unique/experimental gameplay mechanics (but don't tell anyone yet), and put together these rough sales estimates of virtual reality games which fit that category on Steam and Quest:

• Blades & Sorcery: 4,250,000 copies sold at $19.99
• Bonelab/Boneworks: 3,200,000 copies at $39.99/$29.99
• Ghosts of Tabor: 705,500 copies at $19.99 (Mid-2023 launch)
• Half-Life: Alyx: 3,700,000 copies at $59.99 (Steam only)
• Pavlov: 1,855,700 copies at $24.99/$19.99
• Superhot VR: 1,290,000 copies sold at $24.99 (VR version only)
• Vader Immortal series: 1,450,000 at $9.99 (Quest only)

Emphasis on "rough", based on reported figures and user ratings! Interestingly, the creator of Blades & Sorcery reports having 10 million players; he's possibly including players on PICO, the VR headset mainly targeting the Asia market.

At any rate, it's an interesting list! (And please correct me if I'm missing any key datapoints.) It strongly suggests the Steam/Quest market for hardcore VR game is 5 million at the very high end, though of course most games will only sell much less than these hits. 

So it's a small market! But I've already said that a lot. There's an interesting twist to that fact: For indie developers or publishers willing to work with a modest budget, the very smallness of the premium VR ecosystem might sometimes be an advantage:

As a strategist at Meta/Oculus pointed out to me recently, there's only about 300 premium games in the Quest store. Compare than with the tens of thousands of PC games on Steam, or the hundreds of thousands on the App Store, and you're playing in a market where discovery is much less challenging/costly — and a small but passionate audience hungry for new content. I could even make the argument that it often makes sense to launch a premium first-person game on Quest/Steam VR first, and then expand to PC/consoles.