2024 Mixed Reality Report

Over the last year, I have created a list of 400+ MR Apps and I thought it was time to look at how the ecosystem has evolved, what types of content have been published on the store and what users are enjoying in their headsets.?

The report is structured as follows:

• An intro to explain how the list was built and what data were collected?
• A comparison of Gaming Vs. Non-Gaming Apps
• A deeper breakdown of the various categories within the Gaming and Non-Gaming apps highlighting some of the apps I think you should check out
• Some personal considerations and what to expect next

The list is a living resource in Notion that I update regularly. If you want to get full access you should subscribe to the XR AI Spotlight newsletter and you will get it directly in your mailbox along with weekly in-depth interviews with founders and makers shaping the future of XR and AI.

How I Built the List?

Let me start by saying that this represents a very specific portion of the content and experiences available to users. There are several reasons for that:

• It includes ONLY apps that have some MR component to them (an example is Asgard’s Wrath 2 which is fundamentally a VR game bur has an MR mode and consequently made it into the list)
• It includes only a small portion of apps that are not on the Meta store and just a handful for VisionPro (I plan to add a section with WebXR apps).
• Since the research and scraping are done manually I have certainly missed something. If you know an MR app missing please do not hesitate to reach out.

This means that from the data we cannot make conclusions on the general XR market and it is more meaningful to look at how data compare within this group (e.g. how many games Vs non-games apps have implemented MR? How does the average rating compare? Etc). If you have quantitative data on the overall store please reach out as this would really help to add an extra dimension to this report.

For each entry in the list I have added the following 10 parameters:

• Name of the app
• A link where you can get it
• If the app is free or paid
• The app category (more on it below)
• The platform on which it is available (Quest, VisionPro, and webXR coming soon)
• A short description taken from the product page
• A custom tag used to highlight specific features (at the moment used to tag apps that have some AI implementation or Local MR co-op)
• The user rating
• The number of reviews
• The thumbnail of the product trailer

Assigning the category was undoubtedly the hardest part, as I had to make tough distinctions between games or non-games, fitness or sports and music or learning. Ultimately, I am sure some people might disagree with some of my decisions, but the final category was assigned based on my own opinion of whether an app was leaning “more” on one side or the other.

Gaming Vs Non-Gaming Apps

The list at the time of writing this report contains 382 apps. This includes apps that have been built from the ground up with MR in mind like recent releases such as Wall Town Wonders, Party Versus or Squingle or experiences that were originally released as VR-only experiences and that added an MR mode like Puzzling Places or ShapesXR. Based on some estimates of the total number of apps available on the store that I got from Alt Lab VR (estimated at 3891) we can say that only 10% of the apps on the store have implemented some form of MR.?

Half of the apps in the list are paid while the rest are free. This is comparable with the ratio I could gather from AltLabVR where 47% of the apps are free.

When we look more in-depth into gaming Vs non-gaming apps we start seeing some interesting differences.

There is an almost 50/50 split between games and non-gaming apps that have implemented MR. I don’t have data to back this statement up, but I think this is an initial difference we can see from the overall store where games are the main content category. Yet gaming seems to remain the most popular with an overall higher number of ratings and average ratings. It has to be noted that especially for the “number of ratings” the values are very polarised and a small number of apps are responsible for the majority of the ratings.?

For games, the top 10 most rated apps are responsible for 64 % of the number of ratings (98K of the total 152K). You can easily build this filter in the Notion list but the top 5 are Eleven Table Tennis, DigiGods (a free game nobody is talking about with over 11K ratings), The Thrill of the Fight, Big Ballers VR and Vegas Infinite at the first place with a staggering 28 K ratings. It is fair to assume that for none of these apps MR has been the main growth driver and for some like Big Ballers or DigiGods the MR is more of a thick mark than a valuable feature for users.

For non-games, the top 10 apps are responsible for 74% of the ratings (38K of the total 51K). The top 5 is dominated by Fitness and Wellness apps with TRIPP, LES MILLS BODYCOMBAT and FitXR. As you can see below the rest are scattered with very few apps crossing the 100 reviews (123 at the moment of writing this report).

I was also trying to get a feeling of the “quality” of the apps available. Evaluating that at scale is quite tricky but I thought that relying on the number of reviews could be an interesting indicator. I decided to set an arbitrary threshold and count how many apps have less than 10 reviews and it turns out that for games 83% have more than 10 reviews while for non-games only 52%. Another index for “quality” is of course the user ratings. The average doesn’t tell us much with an average of 4.33 Vs 4.12 for gaming Vs. non-gaming app respectively. On the other hand, when we look at the distribution it is clear that gaming apps peak at a solid rating between 4.5 and 4.75.

For Non-gaming the picture is much more scattered (please note that I decided to remove from this analysis the apps that had less than 10 ratings because I felt they would add unwanted noise with apps that were rated a 5 by only one user).

To check out the rest of the report, look at the most popular categories and my personal picks go to the full post on Substack and do not forget to subscribe to get access to the full list ??.