Meta exec hopes VR teens will stick around

This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

“It is a pretty rough time for the game industry.”

Meta Reality Labs director of games Chris Pruett did not mince words when he returned to GDC for his annual talk on the state of VR gaming this week. “I have been in the industry for almost 30 years at this point,” he said. ”This is the roughest period I have ever seen.”

“It’s rough for everybody,” Pruett said. “It’s rough for VR. We are not immune.”

Pruett made these remarks two months after Meta cut more than 1,000 VR-related jobs and significantly cut back on first-party game development. “We shut down several of our studios,” Pruett acknowledged. “And make no mistake: Those were top-class studios.”

Meta’s significant cutbacks have led to unease among VR developers, especially since many third-party studios have had layoffs of their own. Granted, revenue in the Quest store was still up slightly in 2025, according to Pruett. However, much of the medium’s growth has been driven by free-to-play titles like GorillaTag and UG, which are popular with young teens with little disposable income.

Even older hardcore VR gamers “are not spending as much as they used to,” Pruett admitted. However, he did have a message of hope for desperate VR developers: Those GorillaTag players won’t stay 14 forever.

“As you grow older, start to become an adult, you are looking for things that are more challenging to you,” Pruett said.

At the same time, these players likely won’t give up on VR altogether. “They have been playing it since they were 12,” Pruett said. They’re used to a different kind of gameplay with a bigger emphasis on social interaction, and also a lot less prone to motion sickness than older players.

“We’ve never had young adults that were VR native,” Pruett said. And while hard data on what these players may do in the future doesn’t yet exist, he suggested that older players may be into games that retain some of the whacky physics and social components of games like GorillaTag and UG, but with much more polish.

“I suspect that they remain a core group of players,” Pruett said. “But the games they play are going to change, and the amount of money they’ll have to spend will change too.”

In addition to these older teens, Meta is also betting on 30-something consumers to discover VR over the next few years. “They watch a lot of movies, they watch a lot of sports, they watch a lot of Netflix shows,” Pruett said. “But they don’t identify themselves as gamers.”

Pruett suggested that a lot of those consumers won’t buy VR headsets for gaming, but as personal TVs, and devices to watch 3D content. Meta has worked for some time on courting this audience, and reportedly has a lightweight headset with an external compute unit in development that is expected to ship some time in 2027. The company even struck a partnership with James Cameron to kick-start 3D content production for that device.

Pruett suggested that these older consumers will still play a lot of games, even if they wouldn’t self-identify as gamers. Catering to them may require different types of games, including titles that can be played sitting down. “It’s a low-friction, relaxing experience for them, not a workout,” he said.

And while Pruett did not directly comment on the upcoming headset, he did strongly urge developers who want to target that older audience to embrace controller-free interaction. “These guys are going to be basically hand-tracking only,” he said. “They aren’t likely going to own controllers, or use controllers.”

Meta isn’t the only company looking to adults with more disposable income as a new target audience for immersive computing. Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro is optimized for consumers who are interested in media consumption and seated experiences, and Google and Samsung appear to target a similar audience with their $1,800 Galaxy XR headset.

The big caveat: So far, there’s little proof that those audiences are actually big enough to move the needle for VR. Apple has reportedly cut the production of the Vision Pro following lackluster sales, with IDC estimating that the company sold only 45,000 headsets last quarter.

Pruett admitted himself that Meta was taking a bet on older players, calling them “a large looming audience.”

“They don’t exist on the platform today,” he said.