Recently, UploadVR reported about concerns from developers on the Quest / Horizon OS platform. With worries about declining sales and discoverability, they spoke with nearly two dozen VR studios to discuss the current state of shipping VR games on Quest. Despite Meta’s Reality Labs division reporting record revenues and Quest 3S selling well, many developers feel the mood has soured. Now, Meta published a new blog addressing these developer concerns. Samantha Ryan, VP of Metaverse Content, outlined several changes to help developers succeed.
These changes are happening fast, and our platform must evolve to meet the needs of new users and the developers who build for them. We have tools to help builders create great products for the growing audiences on our platform. The new Meta Spatial SDK released last fall makes it faster and easier to build for Quest, especially for developers looking to ship 2D and panel-style apps or port successful mobile experiences to mixed reality. To reach younger audiences looking for fun, social, free-to-play experiences, we’re expanding ways to build and monetize in Horizon Worlds.
Horizon OS has undergone significant changes in the last year, from OS-level features to the management of our store and the user experience of the Horizon mobile app. To welcome a diverse range of customers, we need to improve our ability to deliver relevant content. We move fast and run many experiments, so we don’t always get it right straight away. We’ve heard your feedback, and it’s a major focus for 2025. Here are a few changes made based on developer feedback:
We overhauled our store interface, launched new navigation and genre categories, and refreshed our application taxonomy to ensure our tagging is specific and accurate. Some experiments, like genre categories, are yielding positive early results, while others still need fine-tuning. Store apps are now 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 for new users and 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 led to an increase in successful purchases.
We launched the Quest Cash program and virtual wallet support. Developers can opt-in to platform sales and have granular control over app pricing across various currencies. We want to help developers succeed in two key areas: ease of development and business intel. It needs to be easier to create mixed reality experiences, and our platform must be more accessible to a larger and more diverse set of developers.
Developers also need high-quality information 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 provide these business insights to our developer community through improved dashboards, market and audience insights, and events where our developer community comes together.