Over 1 million people have completed the Quest 3 First Encounters mixed reality presentation experience.

First Encounters starts immediately after you set up a Quest 3 and is not available on previous Meta headsets. It uses the 3D scene mesh that Quest 3 can generate to have the craft crash onto your ceiling and land on a table or floor, as well as allowing you to shoot parts of your real wall. You then have to shoot down waves of invading creatures until a timer runs out. How many you shoot determines your score and your score is recorded in the Quest leaderboard system.

Software developer Daven Bigelow has been diligently following the leaderboard for First Encounters, because on the Meta Quest smartphone app it shows how many other “participants” there are, ie. how many people have completed the presentation of Quest 3. The number of “participants” has now exceeded 1 million.

We wrote “at least” in this title because technically, there is no obligation to complete First Dates. You can refuse to scan your room’s grid or you can leave and skip the experience at any time. It is also unclear whether people who have their own private profile are included in the 1 million figure. If they aren’t, Quest 3 sales will likely exceed 1 million.

At Meta’s March 2023 roadmap meeting revealed to The Verge Meta’s VP of VR Mark Rabkin told staff that the company had sold almost 20 million Quest headsets. Three months after that, another Meta meeting was leaked to The Verge, in which Mark Zuckerberg told staff “we’ve sold tens of millions of Quests.” In July 2021, now-CTO Andrew Bosworth said that the Quest 2 had “outsold not only its predecessor, but all of its predecessors combined”, suggesting that the vast majority of the 20 million Quests sold by last summer were Quest 2.

So eight months after launch, Quest 3 has sold somewhere north of 1 million units, while three years after launch Quest 2 had sold somewhere around 20 million. But this slower pace is not unexpected.

The Quest 2 launched at $100 cheaper than its predecessor, which was promptly pulled from the market. In contrast, the Quest 3 launched at $200 more, and the Quest 2 has continued to sell for an even lower price. As of March, the Quest 2 has sold for $200 while the Quest 3 remains at $500. Quest 2 has continued to outsell Quest 3 on Amazon, and VR developers have told UploadVR that most of their new users are still on Quest 2.

Meta Quest 3S: Specs, details, everything we know so far

Meta’s next headset is the Quest 3S. Here’s everything we’ve heard about it so far, including how it’s likely to compare to Quest 3 and Quest 2.

The meta seems to have a plan to deal with the affordability problem. There has been strong evidence over the past 16 months that it is preparing to release a cheaper alternative to the Quest 3 to directly replace the Quest 2 in its lineup.

In March 2023, Meta’s leaked roadmap mentioned this cheaper headset, and late last month, Quest’s official store listed the “Meta Quest 3S,” a name first seen in an apparent leak three months ago that claimed to it showed the design of the headphones. To top it all off, earlier this month a headset with that design was spotted in the background of a video posted by Meta’s CTO.

If the Quest 3S comes in at the roughly $300 price point expected while retaining the XR2 Gen 2 chipset and mixed reality capabilities, it will likely sell in much higher volume than the Quest 3, increasing the market for mixed reality and giving more power to the developers for working with it. than Quest 2 ever could.