Adding to an increasing number of data points that show why Facebook shifted its attention from the Oculus PC is the difference in momentum between the two platforms, as revealed by the count of game reviews over time. This month, the number of reviews on all Quest games has exceeded the number of reviews on 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, looking at the count of all analysis in a given gaming market over time may give us some indication of the trend in unit sales in that market.
It is worth noting: when it comes to Quest, users are required to install the Oculus smartphone app, which has a variety of mechanisms to pull users back to the app, such as scoreboards and challenge prompts, where they can also write a review for the library games. On the other hand, the Oculus PC application does not have much of this functionality, nor is it always in your pocket.
So, all things being equal, we hoped from the start that a greater proportion of Quest users would write reviews compared to Oculus PC users. Exactly how many more, however, is difficult to calculate. So while it is interesting to see that this month the total number of Quest game reviews exceeded the total number of Oculus game reviews for PC, as we can see below, it is not the score this is particularly interesting, but the trend.
The Rift store and the Oculus PC were launched in March 2016, almost five years ago. The first Quest and its store launched in May 2019. It took just under two years (from May 2019 to January 2021) for Quest game reviews to surpass the number of Oculus PC game reviews.
Another way to see this is to look at the average number of reviews per day. Here we can see that not only the count, but more importantly, the trend is moving up healthily in Quest, while the Oculus PC store is practically stagnant in comparison.
Another interesting point to note is that the number of Mission 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 undoubtedly due to Facebook’s decision to “curate” the Quest store.
Despite the large number of games on the Oculus PC store, only 339 (19%) reached the apparently low barrier of 100 or more reviews. The average number of reviews for each game in the store is 240.
Quest games are far more consistently exceeding 100 ratings, with 201 (79%) exceeding the limit. The average number of ratings for each game in the Quest store is 621.
The value – as revealed through user reviews – is another interesting point of comparison between the two stores. Below, we can see that the rating distribution slopes significantly higher in the Quest store compared to the Oculus PC.
And a final note worth noting: while this data suggests that the Oculus PC store is stagnant, we cannot necessarily extend that conclusion to the general PC VR category, where Steam is one of the largest PC VR markets (and is not represented in this data). On that front, Valve shared some positive figures about using VR on Steam in 2020, and other data suggests that platforms continue to grow.