Meta Says In-App Purchases Out-Earned Premium Quest Sales for the First Time

Meta's developer blog post of November 10, "What to Expect from the Meta VR Ecosystem this Holiday Season and Beyond," reports that in-app purchases passed premium app sales as the largest source of revenue on the Meta Store between January and September 2026, the first time that has happened on the platform. The post is written by Chris Pruett, Meta's director of games, and it adds a second threshold: each of the store's top 50 apps earned more than $1 million after store fees over the same nine months, in a ranking that counts app sales, in-app purchases, subscriptions and Horizon+ payouts together.

Meta did not publish a total. Pruett writes only that developers "took home hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue," and that revenue was "steady compared with the same period last year, even without a new device launch." That qualifier carries weight. The newest Quest is still the Quest 3S from 2024, and the next hardware launch Pruett names is Meta VR Glasses in spring 2027. Below the top 50, he counts "hundreds of apps earning hundreds of thousands of dollars," with no figure for how many apps that is or how the money is spread among them.

Three groups, defined three different ways

Pruett does not publish the ranking itself. He describes the top 50 in three loose cohorts, and because each one is drawn on a different basis, they are easy to misread as three genre lists. The first is a genre: multiplayer competitive social games, which he calls "well represented," among them HERO x HERO, Gorilla Tag, Animal Company and Yeeps. These titles "overwhelmingly monetize with IAP," in his words, and on Quest most of them are free to download. HERO x HERO is the newest of the group. Pruett counts it among 12 major new hits launched in the last 12 months and says it is now one of the platform's top earners.

The second cohort is defined by how it earns rather than by what it is. FitXR, GOLF+ and Walkabout Mini Golf sit in it, along with a desktop streaming utility, a baseball trainer and a fishing game, and Pruett describes its revenue as "mostly (but not exclusively) premium app sales," adding that fitness titles have historically done well with subscriptions. The third group he calls "cross-over" titles, games that are popular across audience segments: BONELAB, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad and a run of multiplayer military shooters.

UploadVR, which reported the post on Thursday, supplies context the post leaves out. Meta has funded premium first-party games for years, including Marvel's Deadpool VR, Asgard's Wrath 2, Batman: Arkham Shadow and Armature's port of Resident Evil 4, and of those only Resident Evil 4 was on the store's top-seller chart when UploadVR checked, at number 44. That chart is a live snapshot rather than Pruett's nine-month ranking, so the two are not directly comparable. UploadVR also notes that Meta's best-performing first-party title is Beat Saber, which was already a popular game when Meta acquired its developer, Beat Games.

Horizon+ is where premium developers get paid

The figure with the most consequence for studios concerns Meta Horizon+, the subscription that gives members a rotating catalog of games for $7.99 a month or $59.99 a year. Among developers in the program, Pruett writes, 80 percent "now earn more from MH+ than from the store," the median developer's revenue mix is more than 70 percent Horizon+, and some take over 90 percent of their revenue from it. Those numbers describe only the developers in the program, and Meta does not say how many that is. For the studios inside it, though, the subscription has replaced the individual sale as the main source of income. A leaked screen reported last week suggested Meta may rename the service Meta VR Plus and add 3D films to it.

Walkabout Mini Golf, from Pruett's mostly premium cohort, shows how thin the line between the models has become. It sells for $24.99 on Steam, where its store page lists 30 paid add-ons.

Studios are already pricing in pieces

Recent launches fit the pattern. Fast Travel Games released PAYDAY: Aces High at $24.99 with five $2.99 store items and has pledged that every future heist will be free. Superbright took the wave defense mode that has been free inside In Death: Unchained since 2020 and sold it on its own as In Death: Siege of Heaven at $11.99. The cost side shows as well: Schell Games, best known for premium releases, announced on October 31 that it had cut about 40 percent of its staff.

Meta has not pulled back from funding games. As of October 1, Pruett writes, it had over $120 million in funding for third-party games in active development. The post does not say how that money divides between premium and free-to-play projects, which is the number that would show where Meta itself expects the store to go.

What it means for buyers and studios

Pruett's guidance on the next device points the same way. For Meta VR Glasses, due in spring 2027 at $1,299.99, he expects games and apps to be "secondary to entertainment consumption," does not expect most owners to have Touch controllers, and tells developers to "design with hand tracking from day one" rather than emulate controller input. For the existing Quest audience he names Quest 3 as the baseline.

For a buyer deciding what to spend on this December, the practical reading is that the store's most visible games are free to start and priced in pieces afterward, and that for the premium developers in Horizon+, the subscription is now where most of their money comes from. Whether Horizon+ is better value than buying games outright depends on how many catalog titles a subscriber actually plays, which Meta's figures do not address. For studios, the data says premium sales are no longer the largest business on Quest, though Meta has published thresholds and shares rather than the totals that would show how large each side of that split really is.