The increase in data points that show why Facebook has shifted its attention away from Oculus PC is the difference in momentum between the two platforms, as evidenced by the game review over time. This month, the number of reviews in all Quest games exceeded the number of reviews in all Oculus PC games.
The number of times a game has been reviewed is usually related to the number of units the game has sold. So if you look at the score of everyone reviews in a particular game market over time can give us an indication of the trend of unit sales in that market.
It’s worth noting: when it comes to Quest, users need to install the Oculus smartphone app, which has a variety of mechanisms to pull users back into the app, such as scoreboards and challenge directions, wherever they ‘ can write a review for games in their library. On the other hand, the Oculus PC app does not have many of the features, nor is it always in your pocket.
So, all in all, we would expect from the outset that a greater proportion of Quest users would write reviews compared to Oculus PC users. How much it is still is difficult to determine. While it’s interesting to see that this month’s total number of Quest game reviews exceeded the total number of Oculus PC game reviews, as we can see below, it’s not the count it is particularly interesting, but the tendency.
The Rift and Oculus PC Store were launched in March 2016 almost five years ago. The first Quest and its store launched in May 2019. It took a little less than two years (from May 2019 to January 2021) before Quest game reviews surpassed the number of Oculus PC game reviews.
Another way to look at this is to look at the average number of reviews per day. Here we can see that not only the score, but more importantly the tendency moves healthy upward on Quest, while the Oculus PC store is largely flat by comparison.
Another interesting point to note is that the number of Quest game reviews is spread over a much smaller number of games. The Quest store has only 253 games, while the Oculus PC store has about 1,800. This is no doubt due to Facebook’s decision to “compile” the Quest store.
Despite the large amount of games in the Oculus PC Store, only 339 (19%) reached the seemingly low standard of 100 or more reviews. The average number of reviews for each game in the store is 240.
Quest Games more consistently exceeds 100 reviews, with 201 (79%) exceeding the threshold. The average reviews for each game in the Quest store are 621.
Value – as evidenced by user reviews – is another interesting point of comparison between the two stores. Below we can see that the rating distribution leans significantly higher on the Quest store versus Oculus PC.
And one last remark worth pointing out: while this data suggests that the Oculus PC store is stagnating, we can not necessarily extend this conclusion to the overall PC VR category, where Steam is one of PC VR’s largest markets are (and are not represented in this data). On the upside, Valve shared some positive figures about VR usage on Steam in 2020, and other data suggests the platforms are still growing.