What to Expect from the Meta VR Ecosystem this Holiday Season and Beyond

Now that Meta Connect is behind us and Meta VR Glasses have been announced, I thought it would be a good time to weigh in on how the Meta VR ecosystem is doing, and what to expect this holiday.

Traditionally, we've seen sales of games and apps in the Store spike with hardware launches. Those launches brought a flurry of new users into the system, boosting developer revenue for many months afterward. But it's been a few years since our last big hardware launch (Meta Quest 3S in 2024), and our next one is Meta VR Glasses in spring 2027. We also recently announced the end of feature support for Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro, so it's reasonable to wonder how the Quest audience is spending in this (rather unprecedented) interim.

The headline is that revenue from January through September 2026 was steady compared with the same period last year, even without a new device launch. From January through September 2026, developers on the Quest platform took home hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. But a closer look at where that revenue is coming from reveals some important trends.

New hits are emerging. In the last 12 months, 12 major new hits launched on the platform, including HERO x HERO⁠, which is now one of our top earners and is holding its own against evergreen successes.

More apps are earning. From January to September 2026, each of the top 50 apps made over $1M in revenue after store fees. Beyond the top 50, there are hundreds of apps earning hundreds of thousands of dollars during that same period.

In-app purchases (IAP) now drive the largest share of revenue on the Store. For the first time, in-app purchases have passed premium app sales as the largest source of revenue on the Meta Store, based on January–September 2026 revenue.

Meta Horizon+ is growing and developers are earning from it. For the developers in the MH+ program, 80% now earn more from MH+ than from the store. The median revenue mix is over 70% MH+, while some developers generate over 90% of their revenue from it.

The top 50 titles by revenue from January to September 2026 (produced by app sales, IAP, subscriptions, or MH+) tells an interesting story about the Quest customer base. On the one hand, multiplayer competitive social games like HERO x HERO⁠, UG⁠, Gorilla Tag⁠, I am Cat⁠, ROBLOX⁠, Animal Company⁠, Scary Baboon⁠, Yeeps⁠, and Beyond Sandbox⁠ are well represented. It’s clear that the Quest 2, 3, and 3S audience continues to spend time and money in social games. These titles overwhelmingly monetize with IAP.

But the top 50 also contains FitXR⁠, GOLF+⁠, PokerStars: Vegas Infinite⁠, Virtual Desktop⁠, and WIN Reality Baseball⁠. Titles like TRIPP⁠, Real VR Fishing⁠, Walkabout Mini Golf⁠, and Dungeons of Eternity⁠ all fall into this category as well. Revenue for this cohort is mostly (but not exclusively) premium app sales, although fitness titles historically do well with subscriptions, and titles like PokerStars⁠ generate revenue exclusively from IAP.

There’s also a cohort of “cross-over” titles: titles that seem to be popular across audience segments. BONELAB⁠, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad⁠, Green Hell⁠, and Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted⁠ land here, as does the multiplayer military tactical shooter genre (Breachers⁠, Pavlov Shack⁠, Ghosts of Tabor⁠, Tactical Assault VR⁠, amongst others).

The winter holidays are always the most active and most profitable period of the year for the Store, so while our results thus far are strong, we still expect performance to increase as we head into the new year.

As we head into 2027, we expect the launch of Meta VR Glasses to bring a more diverse group of customers to the Store. In particular, we expect games and apps to be secondary to entertainment consumption. Customers who do buy games are likely to want seated, hands-first experiences that are “mid-core” in design: challenging to master but not to play.

Meta VR Glasses customers are also likely to enjoy Meta Horizon+, especially if they have Touch controllers. Though we don’t expect most customers to own Touch controllers, those who do will have access to the complete Quest catalog, and we expect Quest 3 and 3S audiences to continue to be active and vibrant.

As we approach the launch next year, these are our expectations. Yet we may be surprised: we’ve never had a product like Meta VR Glasses in the market before, and we expect to learn a lot.

Whether you're an active VR studio or considering getting into VR, my strongest advice to you is to pick a clear audience target and design for them. A few years ago our audience was quite easy to understand, but today it is significantly more diverse, and in 2027 it will get even more diverse. Picking an audience to court will have profound impacts on the design of your app or game, so do it early.

If you’re developing for Meta VR Glasses in mind, design with hand tracking from day one. If you're adapting a title originally developed with controllers to hand tracking, consider tracked hands an entirely separate input mechanism to design for, rather than trying to emulate your existing controls.

Your audience may be brand new to VR, so teach them how to play and give them room to make mistakes. Our documentation on hand tracking design is worth your time, and Jamie Keane, Senior Director of Product, covered the hands SDKs and development tools in the developer state of the union⁠ at Meta Connect, which you can watch now on demand. For a broader look at the upcoming game lineup as you plan your own title, explore the games we announced⁠ last month.

For existing Quest audiences, Quest 3 is your baseline. Social games aimed at teens and young adults should focus on creating communities and giving players ways to express themselves. Always build with user privacy and safety in mind.

Studios supporting players on Quest 2 or Quest Pro should review our November 2 announcement for the end-of-feature-development timeline and guidance for their builds. Existing apps will keep working, and you can continue to publish updates for a time.

The next twelve months will be an extremely exciting time for VR. Through the holiday spike and into the launch of Meta VR Glasses next year, we can expect a whole lot of new people to join the ecosystem. As of October 1, 2026, Meta had over $120M in funding for third-party video games in active development. At Meta Connect, the excitement in the air was palpable. We hope you can feel it too.