By: Samantha Ryan, VP of Metaverse Content
Greetings! I wanted to take the opportunity to formally introduce myself in the midst of an exciting Q1. I joined Meta about a year ago to lead the growth and evolution of our software strategy for the metaverse. As Boz said at Connect, making life easier for developers is a priority for us in 2025 and a place where we know we can do a lot better. One big part of that is more frequent and open communication about the things that matter most to the developer community.
So this year you’ll see us shift to a greater emphasis on sharing knowledge with all of you, which means you’ll be hearing more from me. I’ve been in the software industry for over 25 years, first as an independent developer living hand-to-mouth and then as part of larger companies and collaborating with teams like Rocksteady, Monolith, NetherRealm, Maxis, and Capital Games. I’m an avid gamer on many platforms, from Beat Saber to Diablo and Merge Dragons. And I love pop culture in all its forms, whether it’s Aliens, Columbo, and Avatar, or watching 40+ episodes (you read that right) of Skibidi Toilet with my son.
One consistent principle for me across my career has been a deep appreciation for the customer. As I often tell colleagues when we’re in deep content discussions: The most important people to consider in these conversations are not in the room with us — it’s people we’re all building for.
With that in mind, one way we plan on making this a good year for developers is to share more about the people who make up the Quest community. And after a busy holiday season for Meta Quest there’s plenty to talk about. Let’s dig in.
In 2024 the broader Horizon ecosystem, from Meta Quest devices to the Horizon Store and Horizon Worlds, evolved in ways that will be foundational to its future. A broader range of people are buying Quests, and this expansion has changed some of the tenets of our ecosystem that were previously taken for granted. It has also created important new opportunities for developers and creators.
This evolution is being driven by growth: Compared to the prior year, device sales increased in 2024 and people spent more time on average in Quest 3S devices than any other headset at launch. People also spent more money across Quest devices. Total payment volume on the platform rose 12% in 2024, driven by significant growth of in-app purchases.
The VR enthusiast community remains a foundation of this growing ecosystem. In 2024, existing Meta Quest owners drove a wave of device sales as they upgraded from earlier models, accounting for 27% of Quest 3 and 20% of Quest 3S users for the year. These customers have high expectations for fidelity and gravitate to premium titles that feature high production value, and we continue to see strong performance for titles like
The Thrill of the Fight 2 and
Contractors Showdown that appeal to this audience.
However, the majority of new devices in 2024 were people getting their first Quest headset. As so many newcomers enter the market, the well-known attributes of VR enthusiasts no longer represent the full Quest userbase. For developers seeking to grow their businesses, we’re working on a set of tools and improvements to help connect you with new customers. There’s a rundown of these below, but first I want to share a little more about the ways our userbase is expanding.
There are now a number of unique consumer groups emerging within the ecosystem, each using their devices in distinct ways.
Young people are the clearest example of this trend. They make up a growing share of new users. We’re building a social-first platform, and these younger users are more likely to spend time with friends in multiplayer experiences and social hangout apps. They’re contributing to the rise of free-to-play titles — a pattern historically common on other platforms. We’re also seeing growth of younger users in Horizon Worlds.
This shift signals a growing opportunity for new business models. We expect free-to-play (F2P) to become a broadly viable strategy for developers, who up until now have relied almost exclusively on premium apps. But we don’t think F2P will replace premium apps — both models are likely to coexist.
While the teens and youth cohort has grown on the platform, there’s also a rising group of mainstream consumers who are new to MR and use Quest to enjoy media and entertainment.
We see this growth in entertainment coming from all age groups, and based on early signals we expect this group to continue growing.
Media and entertainment have not historically had high time spent per user on Quest devices, but began increasing over the last couple years. Use of 2D apps has also increased since Quest 3 launch.
Our ongoing operating system improvements, such as multitasking, theater mode, and immersive audio, are intended to support this growing customer cohort, and in 2024 we saw a 10% increase in overall time spent per user per month in media apps, as well as a 21% rise in people using Browser. And Amazon’s new Prime Video app, launched in Fall ‘24, is already a top 10 2D app by time spent on the platform.
These changes are happening fast, and our platform must evolve quickly to meet the needs of new users — as well as the developers who build for them.
We have a set of tools that make it easier for builders to make great products for the fast-growing audiences emerging on our platform. For developers looking to ship 2D and panel-style apps or port successful mobile experiences to MR, the
new Meta Spatial SDK released last fall makes it much faster and easier to build for Quest. And to reach younger audiences looking for fun, social, free-to-play experiences, we’re expanding the ways you can build and monetize in Horizon Worlds.
Horizon OS, the operating system that runs on our Quest devices, has changed a lot in the last year,
from OS-level features and advances all the way to the management of our store and the user experience of the Horizon mobile app.
To welcome an increasingly diverse range of customers, we need to improve our ability to deliver relevant content to them. Because we tend to move fast and run lots of experiments, we don’t always get it right straight out of the gate. We’ve heard your feedback, and it’s a major focus for 2025. Here are a few of the changes we’ve already made based on developer feedback:
- We overhauled our store interface, launched new navigation and genre categories, and refreshed our application taxonomy to ensure that our tagging is specific and accurate. Some of these experiments (like the genre categories) are yielding positive early results, while others still need fine-tuning.
- Store apps have been made more visible on the front page of the Horizon mobile app.
- We’re running ongoing UI/UX experiments in the store to improve discovery, such as introducing a “browse all” grid to our new users, as well as iterating on the design of our top charts.
- We improved search speed and result relevance.
- We’ve made it faster and easier to add payment methods and make purchases, which has translated to an increase in successful purchases.
- We launched the Quest Cash program and virtual wallet support.
- And we’re enabling developers to opt-in to platform sales and have granular control over the pricing of their apps across various currencies.
We want to help developers succeed in two key areas: ease of development and business intel. We need to make it easier to create MR experiences, and our platform must be more accessible to a larger and more diverse set of developers.
Developers also need more high-quality information that’s critical to operating a modern software business: Who are our customers, how are they behaving, what do they buy, and what experiences do they spend time in? This year we’re expanding the way we make these types of business insights available to our developer community, through an improved set of dashboards, market and audience insights, and the events where our developer community comes together. Stay tuned because we’ll have more to share soon.
