Mar 12, 2026

The State of VR at GDC 2026: Building a Sustainable Future

This year at GDC 2026, I did my mostly-annual update on the state of the VR ecosystem for VR developers. This post summarizes the main points of that talk, which you can also watch online soon.

The game industry is changing, and it's painful. It's hard to talk about our little corner of the market without acknowledging the studio shutdowns, layoffs, and game cancellations that have rocked the game industry. VR is not immune, and in the last several years we've witnessed both shifts in player behavior and the cost of operating AAA content that seem quite consistent with industry trends overall. We've even had to shutter some of our own first party studios, who were frankly amongst the most seasoned and experienced VR developers in the world.

But the state of the broader games industry is also galvanizing. Though we know that we cannot control broader larger game industry trends, it's clear that success within our segment requires ongoing, sustained investment—we cannot afford to rest on our laurels if VR is going to grow.

Our investment in Meta Quest and games for Quest remains very high. We've a lot going on—new hardware, new audiences, new games. And though we have some welcome competition, Meta remains the biggest investor in VR in the world by a large margin.

As Samantha Ryan (VP of Content, Reality Labs), laid out last month, we're in it for the long haul. So I took the opportunity in this session to share what's working in VR today, what's changing on Meta Horizon OS and Quest, and how we expect the audience to grow and change in the next few years.

Part 1: Looking back at 2025

Part 2: What's next for VR?

Part 1: Looking Back at 2025

Meta Quest usage hit an all-time high in 2025.

Quest usage has been growing year over year, and in 2025 we hit our all-time highest numbers of unique users ever in our history. The rumors of the death of VR have been greatly exaggerated.

Meta Horizon Store developer revenue was up very slightly compared to 2024.

Similar to the overall games industry (Circana estimates 1% industry growth⁠), the gross revenue generated by the Meta Horizon Store was up very slightly year over year. While this might sound like a humdrum outcome, it's important to note that 2025 did not (unlike the year we're comparing it to) benefit from a hardware launch. As you might imagine, hardware launches tend to spike Store revenue, and holding steady in a no-launch year is a strong signal that ongoing Store investments are paying off.

Premium app sales remain the largest revenue driver for our ecosystem, but IAP grew significantly in 2025, by over 10%.

The trend points to further diversification of monetization techniques on the platform, and better aggregation of success across titles. While most IAP revenue went to a small handful of titles in 2024, it was distributed more broadly in 2025. The number of IAP apps that reached $500k or more in revenue was up 20%.

Over 100 titles generated $1M+ in gross revenue in 2025.

Independent of the monetization model, lots of developers made money in VR. Subscription revenue was also up (by double digit percentage points) but represents a relatively small part of the overall ecosystem and is mostly not associated with video games.

To get an idea of the diversity of titles that did well in 2025, here are a few examples.

UG⁠, a free-to-play early access title popular with teens

HARD BULLET⁠, a physics-based sandbox shooter priced at $19.99

The Thrill of the Fight 2⁠, a realistic boxing simulator also priced at $19.99

These are just a few examples, and I included them to illustrate that success in the last year in VR has not been limited to a few categories or game genres.

Meta Horizon+ is providing significant supplemental developer income.

Meta Horizon+ (MH+) is a subscription service that offers two games per month and access to a back catalog. Players get instant value through a library of titles, and developers are paid out based on usage and minimum guarantees.

Meta Horizon+ delivered meaningful payouts in 2025, nearly $20M across participating developers.

While there are many other game subscription services out there, MH+ is unique in that it's designed specifically to drive ongoing developer revenue. I personally worry that many of the subscription models out there are not sustainable for developers. We built MH+ to be supplemental to game sales, and have kept it curated in order to deliver strong financial results to the developers who participate in it.

Our thesis is that many new Quest customers are also brand new to VR. They get our headset without any prior VR experience, and look at our store without any understanding of which titles are the best. They may not have heard of many VR games, and have yet to understand the magic of a well-built VR experience. It's hard to make a purchase decision when you're brand new to the platform, and Meta Horizon+ gives these new users a way to sample a wide range of high-quality games on our platform.

We built this program on the theory that once exposed to the quality of the games on Quest, customers will want to play more—both titles they get from the subscription and titles that are sold in the Store. And indeed, we see that Meta Horizon+ subscribers spend more money overall on our platform.

The numbers for this program are strong. In 2025, Meta Horizon+ reached over 1M subscribers. In that year we paid out nearly $20M to participating developers. The program catalog is now over 100 games.

Last year we also launched a self-serve application system for developers who want to participate in Meta Horizon+. There are some eligibility requirements, but you can check your app and learn how to express your interest in the Developer Dashboard, as explained in our documentation.

In 2025, Oculus Publishing helped ship over 140 games, and have more shipping this year.

In addition to continuing to support, produce, and fund a wide variety of new games, the Publishing program also added an accelerator fund last year, which looks for ways to double down on organic hits.

I also wanted to give a final update on the Ignition Program. Launched two years ago to help new studios get off the ground in the face of unprecedented game industry layoffs, the Ignition program sponsored 21 startups to build prototypes in VR. All 21 companies delivered their prototypes and 90% told us that they plan to continue development. Three have already shipped in Early Access and another three have signed publishing deals (including one from us). As this program comes to a close, we are extremely happy with the result.

Part 2: What's Next for VR?

We have new hardware devices in development.

We're not ready to talk about them yet, but our investment in future VR headsets remains large.

We have removed individual worlds from the Meta Horizon Store.

As you may have read in Samantha Ryan's post, we are removing Worlds from the shelves of the Store. These worlds are still accessible via the Horizon Worlds app, and Worlds as a platform is shifting its focus to mobile, where it has big plans.

The decision to include Worlds in the Store was based on a hypothesis that it would increase device retention. Retained customers spend more time and more money on the platform, so increasing retention is a lift-all-boats win. And as I reported last year, the impact on app revenue was small (a loss of 3% in a year where revenue still grew by ~12%).

Despite the low impact, this particular design choice was universally unpopular with our developer community. We heard the feedback loud and clear. And after a year of collecting data, experimenting with different landing pages (and making all kinds of other improvements), we concluded that our hypothesis about Worlds' impact on device retention had not been proven out. Based on that data, and the feedback from the developer community, we've removed them from the Store shelves.

The cycle of experiment-learn-adjust is typical for Meta. We are cautious not to make assumptions we cannot prove, and when our assumptions are disproved, we change course. But it's also important for our developer community to understand that we are listening, and their feedback on this particular aspect of our Store played a significant role in our decision making.

Audiences continue to shift, and will shift more in the future.

A major thread throughout my session was audience diversification: as VR has become increasingly mainstream, we have found ourselves with several distinct audience cohorts, each with their own play patterns, tastes, and interests.

VR Elites, our early adopters who drove much of the ecosystem in the Quest 2 era, are still here, but spending less than they used to. I suspect that cohort spends less on games and entertainment on other platforms as well, and that the reasons are primarily economic.

Teens are currently the most active audience using Quest, but a large portion of discovery is happening outside the headset.

Over the next couple of years, we expect more Mainstream Adults to enter VR through media consumption first, then discover games once they are in-headset. These are folks who don't move the needle today, but we expect to arrive as a large ecosystem player in the next few years. They purchase VR as a TV replacement first, then discover that it can also play video games. They are mid-core, love Meta Horizon+, and probably play seated without controllers.

The top games on our platform proactively seek out their audience on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

Though the titles that have achieved success in the last year have been diverse, one common element between them has been user acquisition through social video platforms. Most of the customers who come to our store do not come to browse, they come with a specific title in mind. Increasingly, the top apps are finding their customers via streamers and services like Instagram Reels.

One example I discussed was MyDearest, which shifted their development model from a traditional big-team-many-months approach to a super fast, short-cycle-small-team model that used a high volume of short-form videos to test ideas before committing deeper resources. That approach helped create multiple hits, including Devil's Roulette⁠. MyDearest documented their approach in our developer blog recently.

The teens of today are the core gamers of tomorrow, maybe.

In my talk I took a small detour to opine about the potential, as I see it, for the teen cohort (12 - 16 year olds) to "graduate" into core gamers as they complete high school and move into young adulthood. This audience is our first generation of "VR native" players: they've grown up with VR, have been playing with it since they were tweens, and are comfortable with its conventions. But tastes change as you grow up.

As teens start to be exposed to more sophisticated media, such as R-rated movies and more challenging books, I think that their taste in games also matures. And when they reach 17 or 18, probably they look back at the games they were playing at 13 or 14 with disdain ("that's kids stuff").

In three years the kids playing social meme games in VR today will be in college. Some of them will be well on their way to the workforce. They will be adults with tastes that differ from their tastes today, but with a deep comfortableness and familiarity with VR. I suspect that we've never seen a customer like them before. So the question I wonder about is, what will they want to play?

My conjecture, and it is only conjecture, is that sophistication, polish, and production quality become more important to young audiences as they age up. Their interest in social, unpredictable, co-op and competitive online multiplayer games with serendipitous physics and lore they can explore outside of the game is likely to remain, but their expectations for polish and quality are, I suspect, going to go up. There are a few titles that hint at this already: titles like PEAK⁠ and R.E.P.O.⁠ are very much of the teen form, but are polished and sophisticated and targeted at an older young adult segment (and are both doing very well).

I also suspect that there is space for single player narrative games, but only those that can be made in a very cost-effective way. The big-budget AAA Hollywood style narrative games are simply too expensive for today's market, but there are many other forms of narrative games (everything from visual novels to adventure games) that are significantly lower cost to produce and hook the teen audience with story (consider Five Nights at Freddy's⁠). It seems to me that there's space for such titles with this VR-native young adult crowd in the next several years, but exactly what form those titles take is less clear.

The train of thought here is about trying to look at trends for the future given what we know about the audiences themselves, and the cohort of teens on our platform today seem like they have the potential to become the next generation of core VR gamers as they turn into adults. I included this bit because we spend a lot of time thinking about how tastes will change, and what kinds of games we should produce now for an audience two or three years from now, and I want to encourage the developer community to do the same.

Hand tracking is weird but magical.

I finished my talk by discussing some of the design considerations for designing games around hand tracking rather than controllers. We believe that many of the future Mainstream Adults cohort will simply prefer not to use controllers, and will look specifically for titles that can support hand tracking. Rather than reiterate the information here, I encourage you to read our detailed design and best practices guide to hand tracking. It is a significantly different input than tracked controllers, but likely the only input for some customers in the future.

Watch the Full Session: Coming Soon

Our investment in VR remains strong. Despite the challenging state of the game industry, games on Quest continue to find success and generate revenue. But as our audiences shift, building for the future is critical to success. My goal with this session was to bust some rumors, share some business insights, and give you the tools you need to navigate the undeniably choppy waters of the game industry at large.

We'll have a lot more to talk about later this year. Stay tuned!

For more details from this session, tune into Facebook⁠, X⁠, and our monthly newsletter⁠ and watch the recording when it drops. Start building VR experiences for Meta Horizon OS today by checking out our documentation.

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