Happy Birthday to the Oculus Quest - Charting First Year Demand

Ariel Ariel
5/22/20

The Oculus Quest celebrated its first birthday yesterday. While most virtual reality headsets appealed mostly to serious gamers, the Quest was the to attract mass appeal not just because Facebook owns it, but mainly because it does not require a computer.

A year in, let's see if the Quest managed to become a household name.

App Downloads as a Proxy for Unit Sales

Facebook hasn't released actual unit sales for the Quest. While some have tried to deduce unit sales from revenue, we have a different proxy—app downloads. Setting up the Quest for the first time requires a mobile device with the Oculus app, so every Quest requires a download, giving us another way to estimate the number of Quests out there.

New Quest Activations

On an average day, the Oculus app gets about 3,000 new downloads. That's a lot of devices! Now, not every download is a new device. There could be people downloading the app just for fun, or to manage Oculus' other device, the Rift, so take these with a grain of salt.

Oculus app downloads by month

With an average of 85,000 downloads per month, not including the holiday season, it's fairly safe to say a large majority were for new Quest activations. Not including November and December, we estimate the Oculus app was downloaded 1M times since the Quest started shipping.

A wonderful gift! In the month of December, downloads increased by a whopping 450% to over 380,000 downloads, roughly 24% of total downloads. That's a lot of happy folks who aren't bummed about being stuck at home now.

All in, the Oculus app was downloaded 1.5 million times since the Quest was launched.

Lots of International Expansion Opportunity

Oculus app downloads by month

Using app downloads, we can also see where sales are coming from. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. is, by far, the Quest's biggest market, contributing to 81% of sales. The U.K comes in second at 8%, and Japan rounds out the top three with 5%. In other words, Facebook has a lot of expansion opportunities with the Quest, which is likely to happen in 2021.

App Intelligence for Everyone!

The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

Are you a Journalist? You can get access to our app and market intelligence for free through the Appfigures for Journalists program. Contact us for more details.

All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.

Tagged: #vr

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