Are Random VR Games Making $100 Million?

Nothing about the VR games market makes sense

The other day my boy Lester spun around his laptop to face me and said “hey look at this game where you play as a cat.”

And by God, he was right. It’s a VR game where you play as a cat. Appropriately, it’s called I Am Cat.

So we had a good laugh, like haha what a silly indie game. What will they think of next! And then we looked at the reviews. Fifty-seven thousand ratings. With a 4.9/5 star average.

I said “that’s a lot of reviews,” and Lester said “what do you think the ratio of sales to reviews is?”

We debated it. 10-to-1? I argued that it’s gotta be higher than that. The sales-to-reviews ratio is almost always more than 30-to-1 on Steam. Surely Steam players are more likely to leave a review than Meta Quest users?

As it turns out, Cassia Curran has already done the research on this, and the median number of sales-per-rating on the Meta Quest store is 110-to-1. One rating probably equals 110 copies sold.

It can be lower than that, like 75-to-1. Or way higher. Apparently Among Us VR had 250 sales per review. But let’s keep it simple and go with the median. 110 x 57,000 implies something like 6.3 million copies sold. For a game that costs $19.99!

Hello?? That would be >$125 million gross. For a game that released a month ago. That can’t be right. Right?

But the math checks out. Beat Saber is one of the most popular VR games ever, and it only has ~51k reviews on the Meta Quest store. A Wall Street Journal report revealed that Beat Saber grossed over $250 million as of October 2022. There’s multiple platform releases and plenty of DLC contributing to that figure, but still. We’re in the right ballpark.

Similarly, the makers of Gorilla Tag announced that they had reached 12 million players and $100 million in revenue this summer. That’s a free-to-play game with paid DLC, and it has about 137,000 reviews. The numbers all make sense.

But I wanted to be sure. So I emailed the developers—a studio called New Folder—and asked them whether they’d be willing to share sales figures:

“We can’t disclose specific sales figures but we can confirm that I Am Cat is currently leading in monthly game rankings,” replied the New Folder spokesperson (they didn’t attach a name to their responses). “I Am Cat was in top rankings almost all the time since the release on the Meta Store.”

So… okay, fair enough. The New Folder gang was nice enough to answer my other questions, like this one:

PUSH TO TALK: You've currently got a 4.9 review average on the Meta Quest store. What do you think is making the game stand out and click with players?

NEW FOLDER: We believe the key to I Am Cat's popularity is people's love for pets, particularly cats. Additionally, there aren’t many fun VR games, which makes it stand out.

“There aren’t many fun VR games” is undeniably hilarious coming from the top-selling Meta Quest devs.

Their answers to my other questions were equally unexpected. I asked how the idea for the game came about, and this was their response:

The team at New Folder Studio has been creating VR games since its founding in 2019. The idea for I Am Cat originated from the team's love for pets, particularly cats, as every team member owns one. During a team call, someone joked about being a cat in VR with a paw instead of a hand, and that sparked the concept. Development began in Q1 2023, with the team drawing from their experience on previous VR titles like Titans Clinic, Never Down, and King of Magic, among others.

So the concept of the game came about from a guy pitching the concept of the game, but as a joke. I love it.

At this point I had no idea what to make of the situation. So I DMed Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo—who has published research on estimating VR game sales—and asked him what he made of the situation.

The Plot Thickens

Simon had already heard of New Folder and linked me this interview they’d done with Road to VR. That article shares some helpful context, including that I Am Cat actually first released in the Meta Quest store’s early access program, called App Lab, in May of 2024. The game earned 40,000 reviews in its first five months, which prompted Road to VR to reach out to them.

Notably, Road to VR pointed out, New Folder had released nine VR games within the span of a single year, between October 2023 and October 2024. Within that list of nine games is another massive hit, I Am Security, with 32k reviews and a $11.99 price tag.

So where did these devs come from?

I’m just going to quote from the article here:

The studio tells Road to VR that New Folder Games was founded in Cyprus in 2019 and employs around 15 people, many working remotely.

“The idea for I Am Cat came from our love for pets, especially cats—each team member owns a cat. During a call, one of our team members said, ‘What if I were a cat in VR? And instead of a hand, it would be a paw’—and boom, everything came together,” the studio says.

Development on I Am Cat started in Q1 2023. Just about a year later, the game was launched in Early Access. Five months after the launch, the game has amassed more reviews than the vast majority of other Quest titles.

“We believe the key to I Am Cat’s popularity is people’s love for pets, particularly cats. Additionally, there aren’t many fun VR games, which makes it stand out,” the studio said matter-of-factly.

Those are the same quotes they emailed me. The second one is word-for-word! I have no idea what to make of this.¹

But I still desperately wanted to know: is this really a $100 million game?

It might be. But Simon Carless offers an alternate theory: “They may prompt for reviews aggressively,” he wrote to me, “and that might multiply reviews by as much as 4x or 5x. Most games don't do that on Quest—tho it's clearly still VERY popular, don't get me wrong.”

So the idea here is that if I Am Cat somehow incentivizes players to review more often, its sales-to-reviews ratio would be lower, maybe as low as 20-to-1 or 30-to-1 instead of 110-to-1. But even in a scenario like that, this would still be a game that has sold at least a million copies.

Commenters on the r/OculusQuest subreddit offer some possible backup for this hypothesis.

In a recent thread about the game Blacktop Hoops, a Reddit user shared their suspicions that its developers had “botted” reviews.

One user offered an alternate theory: most of the reviews came from players who downloaded it for free.

That doesn’t apply to I Am Cat. As best as I can tell, it has always cost between $15 and $20. A little further down the thread, though, we get a lead:

Aha! Apparently I Am Cat gives players a special item for reviewing it.

With a bit more research, I was able to confirm this. It turns out that in the game there’s a little TV in the kitchen that prompts users to leave a review to unlock golden claws for their cat.

So does that mean I Am Cat’s review numbers are fluffed?

Honestly, I don’t think so. There is a ton of very genuine enthusiasm for this game online, particularly among content creators. And just look at the gameplay footage. The game looks super fun and original. You get to be a cat and mess up a granny’s house!

This YouTube short about the game has 22 million views:

Here’s an incomprehensible YouTube short about the game with 33 million views. And here’s a Spanish video with 5 million views. And here’s a Russian video with, again, 5 million views. The New Folder team themselves have gotten millions of views on their TikTok videos about the game.²

My take? The game’s legit. There’s a good chance I Am Cat is an international hit that has made “merely” tens of millions of dollars. And it is possible it’s a $100 million megahit—more money than many Hollywood blockbusters make.³

What else can you say? The VR games market is weird.

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go make a VR game where you’re a dog chasing squirrels.

I’ll see you at my mansion.

1. I mean, maybe I should ask more original questions.

2. Rolling the dice on whether that link still works three days from now.

3. Simon Carless’s take: “I would say there's a good chance it's grossed tens of millions. I don't think it has made $100m gross.”