This week, Meta launched a new Meta Quest store page revealing the top-50 best-selling games of all time on the platform. I was tipped off to it yesterday when one of my favorite VR games, Walkabout Mini Golf, posted on X about being the 20th best-selling game of all time on the Quest. Funny enough, Walkabout shares one common trait with 80% of all games on the list.
But it's not the type of game that's the trait, nor is it the price of the games or their complexity. The official list actually sports a ton of variety, with all but maybe one major genre not represented (strategy games).
No, instead, I noticed that only 11 out of the top-50 games were part of an already-established franchise: Among Us, Five Nights at Freddy's, Resident Evil, The Room, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, The Walking Dead, and four Star Wars games. And most of these were original spin-offs, with only a few ports.
Nearly 80% of the best-selling Meta Quest games of all time are from names you've never heard of if you don't have a VR headset. While that could be worrisome for some players, I think it's a very good thing.
Out with the old
Years ago, I wrote about how big publishers ignoring VR was a good thing. These companies often don't care about gaming as an art and are only in it to make millions of dollars. Take Assassin's Creed Nexus, for example, which has made Ubisoft several million dollars and saw an uptick in sales around the release of Assassin's Creed Shadows. Despite making quite a bit of money for the company, it didn't land on the top-50 list.
Notably, Metro Awakening, Batman Arkham Shadow, and even the recently-released Alien: Rogue Incursion aren't on there, either. In fact, the only games on the list that would fit a more traditional definition of a AAA game are The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, Resident Evil 4, and Arizona Sunshine. Compare that with the list of best-selling PlayStation 5 games, which includes franchises and names everyone in the world knows.
That all plays in quite nicely with the narrative that "there's no money in VR gaming" among big publishers, but the reality is that this couldn't be further from the truth. What appears to be the case is that AAA games don't sell boatloads of copies on the Quest platform, but that doesn't mean they don't make good money.
Looking at the top-earning games of the week shows what I'm talking about. The top-3 titles are all free-to-play games, which have driven the biggest revenue growth on the platform in recent months, but below that, you'll find many of the AAA games I listed above.
The Walking Dead, Alien, and Assassin's Creed are all in the weekly top 50, and while these games certainly seem to be doing well for themselves, there aren't many other games of this caliber on the list.
If anything, this proves the point that VR gamers are putting on headsets to try something new and exciting, not just to rehash the games they've been playing for years (or decades). As VR continues to grow in 2025 and developers find new and unique ways to immerse gamers, it's clear that the most original games that take advantage of the medium's strengths — perhaps like Dimensional Double Shift or Orion Drift — are the ones that will end up on the top-50 bestseller list far into the future.
