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The games industry is in a state of flux.
Gamers, developers, and investors are navigating uncertainty, caught between excitement for innovation and skepticism from past disappointments. Amid this landscape, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and extended reality (XR) — collectively called "spatial computing" — are gaining renewed attention.
Companies like Apple and Meta are pouring billions into spatial computing hardware, pushing technological boundaries and prompting industries to explore new applications. The gaming industry, in particular, is keeping a close eye, speculating on these devices' potential as future platforms. However, despite significant investments and multiple product launches, spatial gaming has yet to become mainstream.
As optimists and fans of these technologies, we (Afo and Matt, here 👋) are excited by the recent interest. Yet, within the games industry, reception has been mixed. Past VR and AR hype cycles have led to overblown projections, leaving builders and investors hesitant to commit further resources. While Apple and Meta have invested heavily in R&D and content acquisition, broad consumer adoption remains elusive. Incumbent AAA publishers have largely abandoned VR/AR development, preferring to let startups explore this blue ocean before making a serious attempt at market entry. Gamers have also been slow to adopt, with price, form factor, and limited content acting as barriers.
Despite these challenges, spatial gaming optimists persist. Our hope is to offer a fresh perspective. We believe that there are still many unexplored and underexplored areas of game design, social interaction, and innovative monetization that a robust spatial gaming ecosystem might unearth. However, we also understand hesitation, current market data is either overly optimistic or underwhelming, providing no clear case for substantial investment.
To reconcile the idealized future of spatial gaming with present-day challenges, we decided to start at the beginning. Mapping spatial gaming's trajectory within the broader evolution of the gaming industry and envision where it might go. While technological improvements are still needed, we hope this analysis helps move us closer to a future where spatial gaming thrives.
Table of Contents:
How Platforms Shape Play
Elephants in the Room
Bulls, Bears & Benchmarking
Looking Ahead
In Conclusion
Endnotes
Note - As you may have inferred, we’ll be using the term “spatial gaming” throughout this report to describe gaming formats that broadly encompass VR, AR, and XR.
From its origins in bars and arcades to its ascension to PCs and consoles and its rapid spread to mobile devices, the games industry has undergone near constant change and disruption over the course of its 50+ years of development. Each of these shifts has not only transformed how and where games are played, but has also altered the balance between the centralization and interconnected play.
Despite ongoing change, the last major platform disruption occurred nearly 20 years ago with the rise of smartphones and app stores. Now, spatial computing has the potential to become a new platform, redefining how we experience the world through interactive entertainment by merging digital and physical realities.
To understand how spatial computing might impact the gaming industry, it's essential to examine the technological shifts that have shaped its history. By exploring prior platform shifts—from centralized arcade experiences to today's interconnected cross-platform games—we can better anticipate how spatial computing might drive the next evolution in gaming.
In the 1970s, arcades were the epicenter of gaming. They offered a communal space where players gathered to play, compete, and socialize. The centralized nature of arcades meant that gaming was often a shared experience, with the physical space playing a crucial role in how games were consumed. This was partly a result of the practical realities of the time: arcade cabinets were too expensive and bulky for the vast majority of consumers to be able to access at home. As a result, game publishers sought to offset these costs by placing their products in centralized public spaces with high foot traffic and a natural inclination to social interaction: locations like bars, shopping malls, and bowling alleys.
However, this centralized model began to shift as companies like Atari, Magnavox, and Coleco began to release the first generation of consoles built for at-home use. This marked the beginning of a new era where gaming steadily shifted away from public spaces and into the privacy of the home.
As the home console market began to boast major successes like the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo Entertainment System, players increasingly gained the ability to enjoy gaming on their own terms. This shift decentralized access to games, making it more accessible to a broader audience, but with the added effect of isolating the experience.
Instead of potentially reaching anyone walking through a mall, home consoles restricted a game’s audience to the number of controllers that could be plugged into a device. Instead of competing for a few quarters from everyone in an arcade, games now needed to compete for as many dollars as possible from the smaller number of households able to afford a console.
The increasing focus on solo experiences resulted in all manner of innovations in single-player design: improved graphics, richer narratives, and grander experiences. Content flourished, exploring countless new genres and storytelling devices. Hardware, however, seemed only to improve in terms of technical performance. Though many of the technical breakthroughs in arcades still informed PC and console development for years to come, gaming would only further cement itself as an at-home activity, marketed primarily to kids and teens.
As technological improvements plateaued, game developers struggled to push the boundaries of immersion beyond the TV set and into the real world. That’s not to imply that they didn’t try, though. Even in those early days, there were glimmers of what we might now recognize as nascent forms of spatial computing. Nintendo, for example, experimented with peripherals like the Power Glove and Virtual Boy; devices that aimed to bring a new level of physical interaction and immersion to gaming, albeit with limited success.
These early attempts at spatial gaming highlighted both the challenges and potential of integrating physical space into digital play. While the technology of the time couldn’t fully realize these ambitions, it helped to lay the groundwork for the future: a time when spatial computing might finally deliver on the promise of immersive, physically integrated gaming experiences without sacrificing the communal and social qualities of gaming’s earliest days.
The explosion of mobile gaming in the early 2000s was another transformative era for the industry. Though handheld devices like the Game Boy had already introduced the idea of portable gaming to the masses, it was the advent of smartphones (in particular, the iPhone and its App Store) that truly unshackled mobile gaming. Suddenly, anyone with a smartphone could access a vast array of games – anywhere, at any time – putting interactive entertainment into the hands of billions of people around the world.
This shift didn’t just change where games were played, but also how they were designed. The touch interface of smartphones introduced new forms of interaction, moving away from traditional controllers and buttons to more direct manipulation of on-screen elements. In a way, this can be viewed as a precursor to the types of interactions we see in today’s early spatial computing applications, where hand tracking and gesture control are increasingly pivotal to the gaming experience.
Moreover, mobile gaming's emphasis on accessibility and portability directly parallels the goals of spatial computing. Just as mobile games made interactive entertainment a ubiquitous part of daily life – through its short sessions and its integrations with Bluetooth, cameras, GPS, and other smartphone hardware – spatial computing has the potential to integrate gaming even more seamlessly into our everyday environments. Through its ability to transform nearly any physical space into an interactive play area, or even to create virtual screens out of thin air, spatial computing promises to make interfacing with digital realities feel as natural as interacting with the physical world around you.
Today, the games industry is a cultural and economic behemoth. Gaming can be found on all manner of fixed and portable devices, stretching the limits of immersion and accessibility in every direction.
On one end of the spectrum, today’s high-end interactive entertainment compares favorably with feature films, showcasing in-depth storytelling, engrossing virtual worlds, and IPs that are rapidly crossing over to more traditional forms of linear entertainment. At the same time, the games industry is also host to several massively successful “games” that might be more accurately described as digital “third places” for players to make friends and hang out, where the “game” itself is a secondary concern.
“[B]y providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new ‘‘third place’’ for informal sociability. Participation in such virtual ‘‘third places’’ appears particularly well suited to the formation of bridging social capital—social relationships that, while not usually providing deep emotional support, typically function to expose the individual to a diversity of worldviews.”
– Constance A. Steinkuehler & Dmitri Williams
Source: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places”)
What’s more, we’ve even seen games converge with IRL experiences, combining social design with physical presence. The most widely played of these has been Pokémon GO – an “AR” game that is not really AR-native at all, but more accurately described as a location-based game with AR overlays. Labels aside, Pokémon GO and titles like it have shown the potential for what can be achieved at the intersection of physical and virtual realities.
In the nearly twenty years since the first iPhone was released, the commercial and cultural significance of gaming has attracted massive amounts of investment and talent to the space. This has resulted in a host of creative and technological innovations in areas complementary to gaming:
Ubiquitous Internet connectivity, GPS, and AR cameras have combined to allow games to expand beyond the boundaries of homes and arcades and out into the broader physical world.
Haptic feedback and motion controls – two sets of technologies that have steadily improved through their use in both console and mobile games – have allowed game developers to improve immersion, unlock new forms of user input, and experiment with novel game designs.
Cloud computing has demonstrated that gaming can be untethered from high-powered machines, allowing gamers to focus on the experience rather than the device.
Though many of these technological advances have struggled to commercialize and stand on their own as sustainable businesses, they collectively represent an increasingly robust set of technologies available for forthcoming generations of game developers to combine and reimagine in the context of spatial computing.
The lines between digital worlds and physical realities are rapidly blurring. In this context, spatial computing represents more than just the next potential gaming platform: it is the culmination of all the previous innovations that have come before it.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, though, let’s quickly review the present state of the spatial gaming market. This will give us an idea of what’s working today, where the technology is falling short, and where we should expect future innovation to come from.
It’s worth taking a brief digression to acknowledge the current incumbents in the spatial computing ecosystem: Apple and Meta.
Though there are other players competing at the periphery (ByteDance, Valve, and Sony, to name a few), the importance of Meta and Apple in the race for spatial computing dominance cannot be overstated. They represent two differing – and in many ways, diametrically opposed – views on this emerging set of technologies. It seems likely that the hardware and platform infrastructure being built by these giants of Silicon Valley will define the landscape of spatial computing for years to come.
Apple is no stranger to making waves in emerging industries. The company has sought to redefine how we view and interact with technology dating back to the release of its first Macintosh computer.
Apple is not in the business of creating new technology, but rather redefining how we interact with it. It didn’t make the first PCs, smartphones, or tablets, but reimagined how they could be used and experienced. With its Vision Pro, Apple is once again attempting to step into an existing field of technology, flip the table upside down, and paint it anew.
Consumer experience comes first at Apple. While some may feel the company has strayed from Steve Jobs’ initial vision, Apple’s products still largely adhere to the company’s classic slogan from the 90’s: “Think Different.” Apple products are not merely focused on productivity, but on how consumers perceive and interact with the world around them. With that in mind, Apple’s Vision Pro offers the company one of its largest canvases yet with which to craft unique experiences.
Despite its best intentions, however, Apple’s present approach to spatial computing is far from perfect. Early reviews for the Vision Pro praised the device for its sense of immersion, its high level of fidelity, and its innovative approach to eye and hand tracking, but the headset still left a lot to be desired in terms of battery life, device weight, app ecosystem and overall affordability. In terms of spatial gaming apps, specifically, the selection was meager. The company touted just twelve “unique spatial games” at launch, several of which were ports of existing VR games.
As a result of these shortcomings, the early results for Apple have been disappointing, with both consumers and developers slow to adopt the expensive new product. According to research firm IDC, the company is expected to sell fewer than 400,000 units in its first year.
Further dampening optimism around the Apple Vision Pro’s launch has been the tepid response from the game development community. According to a damning report from MobileGamer.biz, developers have struggled with the lack of technical support from Apple, the absence of financial incentives offered for building games on the platform, and the difficulties of discoverability once a game is eventually released, among several other gripes.
“Developing for Vision Pro is like going back in time 10 years because despite the advertised power – and the cost – it is not a machine built for gaming. Getting any complex games working on the platform is difficult.”
— Apple Vision Pro developer
Source: MobileGamer.biz
At the time of this report, it remains to be seen how Apple will react to these challenges. It has long been speculated that the Vision Pro represents only the company’s first foray into spatial computing, with more affordable consumer-oriented models on the horizon. Whether future iterations will result in improvements to the gaming ecosystem remains to be seen, but it seems far too early to count Apple out just yet.
For all the innovation and man hours that Apple has put into the research, development, and launch of its Vision Pro, its overall investment in spatial computing hardware may still fall short of that of its rival, Meta.
The tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp has poured tens of billions of dollars into its Reality Labs division over the last several years, netting losses equivalent to the combined market caps of some of its social media rivals. Expenditure first began to meaningfully increase in 2018 and 2019, growing exponentially in subsequent years. The company formerly known as Facebook officially rebranded itself to Meta in late 2021, solidifying its intentions to create “The Metaverse” and signaling to investors and competitors alike just how serious CEO Mark Zuckerberg was about an idea that many took to be little more than a passing fad.
Meta’s spatial computing ambitions can be traced back to 2014, when it spent $2B to acquire VR headset pioneers Oculus. Having infamously missed out on the prior generation of hardware innovation (the smartphone), Meta’s bet at the time of the Oculus acquisition was to leapfrog other established hardware manufacturers. The company hoped that building in a blue ocean – the nascent field of virtual reality – would provide it the competitive flexibility to develop a cohesive, vertically integrated experience that would be supported and augmented by its existing suite of social media applications, advertising solutions, and communications tools.
After early releases failed to take hold, however, the company was forced to rethink its approach. Like Apple, Meta’s inaugural product offering displayed impressive technological achievements for its time, but failed to meaningfully expand the market (the first Meta Quest headset is estimated to have sold only about 1M units).
These early speedbumps resulted in interesting strategic decisions from Meta. The first of these was a shift away from enterprise and productivity use cases, opting instead to prioritize gaming applications. The company brought on several experienced gaming executives in its effort to build a VR gaming powerhouse, including hiring legendary game developer and co-founder of id Software, John Carmack, as CTO of Oculus. Meta’s gaming focus also led it to acquire several game development studios, including Sanzaru Games (developers of the Asgard’s Wrath series of VR titles), Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR), Camouflaj (Iron Man VR), and Beat Games (Beat Saber), among others.
Meta clearly intended to establish a foundation of leading gaming content to populate its nascent VR app ecosystem. However, any winning platform inevitably requires a supportive developer ecosystem to flesh out its library of content. This fact led Meta to its second and perhaps most significant move: the decision to open its operating system to third-party hardware makers.
This stands in stark contrast to Apple’s traditional “walled garden” approach and sets up a similar dynamic to what played out in the mobile ecosystem between iOS and Android. To quote Zuckerberg himself:
“[I]n every era of computing, there are always open and closed models. Apple’s closed model basically won out. Phones are tightly controlled and you’re kind of locked into what they’ll let you do. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the PC era, the open model won out. You can do a lot more things, install mods. You got more diversity of hardware, software and more.
So our goal is to make it so the open model defines the next generation of computing again with the Metaverse, glasses, and headsets. That’s why we’re releasing our operating systems so that more companies can build different things on it.”
– Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO, Meta
Source: Instagram
Working with a variety of third-party developers will allow all hardware manufacturers to focus on narrower use cases (e.g. gaming, education, industrial, and enterprise use cases, etc.), rather than forcing Meta to create a headset that appeals to everyone.
We have already begun to see this play out in the company’s latest hardware lineup. Meta’s Quest 3 model has taken a leap forward by introducing mixed reality and full-color passthrough, offering users a broader spectrum of immersion than all-out virtual reality. Its Meta Ray-Bans AR device takes this a step further, bringing spatial computing to a more mainstream, casual audience. The company has also previewed additional specialized devices from ASUS and Lenovo for gaming and enterprise use cases, respectively, as well as a prototype of its Orion AR glasses, targeting a 2027 launch.
Though it’s far too early to call Meta the winner of the spatial computing race, it is the clear leader today. Let’s take a look at the available data to get a clearer picture.
In the following pages, we will take a look at the publicly available data on spatial gaming and seek to draw our own conclusions about the state of the market today.
Whether you believe spatial computing is at the beginning of an exponential curve or in the midst of yet another industry hype cycle, our hope is that by providing a data-forward approach we will be able to help readers clarify their own positions (and perhaps even change some minds in the process).
There are two major components to understanding the spatial gaming market: hardware and content. We can further subdivide these into VR and AR, since most research providers have not broadly adopted the terms “spatial gaming” or “spatial computing.”[1]
On the hardware front, adoption has lagged behind other gaming formats. Research firm Omdia has reported that VR headset sales have actually been falling for the last two years and forecasts that trend to continue through 2025.[2] Another report from IDC shows a similar figure for 2023 sales (7.6M to Omdia’s 7.7M), though it comes in much more optimistic on future prospects with a predicted 21.9M headsets shipped in 2027.
The majority of these sales can likely be attributed to the Meta Quest. Venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz claims that more than 30M Quests have been sold to date, based on estimates derived from app downloads. According to AR Insider, “Meta famously doesn’t provide sales numbers,” though the estimate seems plausible.[3]
Other major competitors include the aforementioned Apple Vision Pro, Sony’s PSVR line of headsets, and ByteDance’s Pico. However, all of these trail Meta in market share and two of the three (PSVR and Pico) have been subject to cutbacks or reductions.[4]
Unsurprisingly, AR hardware is even less widespread. Examples in this category include the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Microsoft’s HoloLens, XREAL’s Air2, and the Magic Leap 2, among others.[5]
Reliable publicly available data is hard to come by here, given the specialized nature of the devices and the overlap with VR headsets. Statista Market Insights estimates the worldwide revenue totals for AR hardware to be $6.3B in 2024. If we assume an average sale price between $500 and $1,000, that would put us anywhere from ~6.3M to 12.6M units sold across the entire ecosystem.[6]
However, even conservative estimates here seem overstated. The Wall Street Journal added another data point in 2023 when it reported that Meta had sold only 300,000 of its Meta Ray-Ban Stories (the first generation of its AR glasses) in the roughly year and a half since launching the product line. It went on to report that the company only had about 27,000 monthly active users (MAU) and that Meta had projected between 394,000 and 478,000 unit sales for the entire lifetime of Ray-Ban Stories.
Despite all of the above, two major challenges remain unaddressed. First, these unit sales forecasts pale in comparison to the dominant gaming form factors of today. Though spatial computing is still in its nascency, it has a long way to go from a sales perspective to become competitive.[7]
Second, and perhaps most importantly, these rough sizing exercises only take unit sales into consideration; they do not account for actual user engagement with spatial computing devices. Gaming companies compete not only on sales, but on the share of users’ engagement time that they are able to monopolize. When engagement is factored in, the realistic addressable market for VR and AR content today is likely far smaller than hardware sales might otherwise indicate.
“Content is king,” as the saying goes. Indeed, flagship content and IP are the engines powering most, if not all incumbent gaming platforms today. Despite this, the so-called “killer app” thesis has yet to unfold for spatial gaming. This idea – that a truly valuable or compelling application will drive meaningful platform adoption – has simply not proven true for VR and AR hardware. There are several reasons why this may be the case.[8],[9]
The first and most obvious argument why there has not been a killer spatial gaming app yet is that there simply aren’t any quality products. This, however, is easily refuted. Though many VR and AR games lack the polish of the high-budget AAA console and PC titles that gamers are accustomed to, there are still several critically acclaimed titles available on the market.
On the VR front, titles such as Valve’s Half-Life Alyx (currently sitting at a 93 Metacritic score as of this writing), fantasy epic Asgard’s Wrath II (87 Metacritic), and streamer favorite Beat Saber (86 Metacritic) are all widely hailed as fun, compelling gaming experiences. There are also several popular games from other platforms that have made their way to VR: Roblox, Superhot, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Among Us, to name just a few. Heck, EA’s VR adaptation of Medal of Honor even won an Academy Award.
We can also quickly dispel the notion that there are no compelling IPs available in VR. Beyond the established gaming franchises just mentioned, we can also point to others like The Walking Dead, Star Wars, Resident Evil, Horizon Zero Dawn, John Wick, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Pokémon, and many more well known properties that have tried their hands at creating experiences for this new medium.
“We have been a bit disappointed by what we were able to achieve on VR with Assassin’s Creed. It did OK, and it continues to sell, but we thought it would sell more, so we're not increasing our investment on VR at the moment because it needs to take off.”
– Yves Guillemot, CEO, UbisoftSource: GameRant
AR has also had its fair share of notable franchises attempt to create a killer app, including Pokémon, Harry Potter, Jurassic World, Minecraft, and Angry Birds, to name a few. Though the aforementioned Pokémon GO has been a massive commercial success, all other attempts have struggled to find traction. Even if we consider these proper AR apps (a debatable assertion), it’s hard to argue that they have driven any sort of hardware adoption on their own.
Yet, despite the lack of true breakout hits, we should not assume that spatial gaming holds no commercial opportunity for pure-play content developers. On the contrary, the business opportunity for game makers may be larger than ever before.
According to Meta’s Director of Content Ecosystem, Chris Pruett, the Quest store has “made over $2B in sales by 2023” and features “over 40 titles [that] have generated $10M+ in revenue.” It was recently revealed that Another Axiom, developers of breakout success Gorilla Tag, is among those titles. The game has pulled in a whopping $100M+ in lifetime revenue with an average playtime of nearly 60 minutes.
While it is true that one successful game (or even 40) does not validate a successful platform, these data points are, at minimum, indicative of the potential to generate meaningful returns with winning VR content. Layer in additional future growth in the hardware install base and deepening of its user engagement profiles and suddenly those returns become more compelling. At least one outlet, research firm ALDORA, has estimated that the VR market “shows room for growth,” predicting an 11% increase through 2025.
Another area of spatial computing that has already found traction is in B2C commercial applications of AR. Mobile AR, specifically, has been adopted by many consumer brands as a means to preview purchases, digitally interact with products, and amplify immersion during the shopping experience. This is obviously not a gaming application, but it is yet another proof point that these emerging technologies can be effectively monetized at scale.
“Mobile AR revenue is projected to grow from $10.5 billion in 2023 to $21.5 billion in 2028. In fact, mobile AR revenue today exceeds other XR sectors we track, such as headworn AR and VR, as it piggybacks on a global base of 3.6 billion smartphones.”
– ARtilleryIQ, spatial computing research firmSource: ARtilleryIQ
Spatial computing applications clearly have the capability to be both critically acclaimed and commercially viable. We have seen multiple instances of this in different branches of spatial computing – some in head-worn VR, some in mobile AR – but few, if any game developers have been able to bring it all together into one standout spatial gaming experience. This state of affairs remains the status quo today, despite the licensing of major gaming and entertainment IPs, despite repeated attempts from experienced AAA game developers, and despite billions of dollars of investment in hardware research and development.
So, what’s missing? How does spatial gaming evolve from here?
We believe that there’s tremendous untapped potential in spatial gaming. We expect to see meaningful improvements to both hardware and content, which should be further augmented by the rapid development of complementary technologies like generative AI. The next wave of spatial games has the opportunity to establish a new foundation upon which novel immersive ecosystems can grow and thrive.
Of course, no one has a crystal ball, but we do have some clues as to what might work. We have bucketed our forward-looking predictions into the following four loose categories:
Spatial-Native Games
The UGC Economy
Third Place for Youth
Re-Centralization
The logical place to begin when predicting the future of spatial gaming is to consider which types of games are intrinsic to spatial environments and thus unable to be reproduced on traditional platforms: what we’ll refer to here as spatial-native games. These experiences blend physical activity and environmental interaction with games or game-like mechanics, taking full advantage of the unique capabilities of spatial computing to create immersive mixed reality experiences.
“Success stories in every new network will be homegrown—the opportunity/switching cost for would-be emigrants established on other platforms is too high.”
– Chris Paik, Investor, Pace CapitalSource: Every
We’re already seeing early examples of this thesis start to emerge. Experiences such as PianoVision, which combines rhythm gaming with piano instruction, are adding layers of interactivity to traditionally solitary practices. Other projects like Flaivor and PencilXR are exploring similar approaches to cooking and drawing, respectively.
While most attempts in this area are currently focused on skill building and ease of use, historical precedent suggests that meaningful businesses can be built on top of these applications through the addition of features like leaderboards, streaks, goal-setting, and social reinforcement, among others. Apps like Duolingo, Daylio, and Finch have shown the power of gamification in a two-dimensional world, while companies like Strava and Zwift have already pushed into three dimensions. Spatial computing will level up these experiences in entirely new ways.
Additionally, as spatial computing hardware shrinks, more casual form factors like Meta’s Ray Ban or Orion glasses will enable gamified experiences in everyday settings. Whether it’s collecting items in a museum, turning a walk in nature into an unexpected adventure, or gathering with strangers at a park to take down a raid boss, nearly any setting can be transformed into a spatial gaming experience.
It’s worth noting that the tabletop gaming genre has been an early adopter of this spatial-native approach, as evidenced by companies like Tilt Five and Mirrorscape. Though these platforms come with their own set of limitations (dedicated game boards and headsets in Tilt Five’s case; a lack of controllers or hand manipulation for Mirrorscape), they further demonstrate the broad potential of spatial gaming.
As spatial gaming begins to take off, a corresponding demand for content to fill those gaming experiences will follow. The 3D models, environment art, visual effects, and other assets that bring these worlds to life will all need to be created and deployed to a near-limitless variety of physical spaces.
While some of this will inevitably derive from game developers themselves, the sheer volume of content required leads us to believe that a robust user-generated content (UGC) and modding scene will emerge around spatial gaming. This movement will be both supported and supercharged by several complementary technologies, such as generative AI, photogrammetry, volumetric video, and blockchains.
We can already see incumbent UGC platforms and VR creation tools implementing this tech into their offerings. Companies like Roblox and Rec Room are actively incorporating generative AI into developer tooling, making it easier for creators of all levels to quickly generate high-quality experiences across platforms and in real time. Epic Games, creators of Unreal Engine, has been a leader in photogrammetry and volumetric capture, incorporating tools like RealityScan into its industry-leading suite of game development tools. Unreal competitor Unity has also been active in both photogrammetry and AI. We’re even seeing ambitious AI companies emerge to meet the need for so-called “spatial intelligence,” to borrow a term from the recently unveiled World Labs.
We believe AI-powered content creation will revolutionize how gamers and creators interact with spatial worlds. The young creators getting started with these tools today will become the seasoned AR and VR developers of tomorrow.
Imagine using generative AI to build a castle in your living room, with the combination of LLMs and AR tools adapting the castle’s structure to the room's dimensions and layout on the fly. What seems cutting edge to us today will soon be a typical means of creation for the future builders of spatial gaming.
Other innovations will need to occur on the backend, too. For spatial gaming experiences to persist across sessions and users in public spaces across the world, one or more layers of ubiquitous virtual positioning systems will need to emerge. Data storage, permissions, moderation, and so on will all need to be solved. One possibility is that this may come from a centralized offering, such as Niantic’s Lightship SDK (though as you’ll see in the image below, coverage still has a long way to go).
Another possibility is the emergence of a decentralized offering supported by blockchain technology. By leveraging blockchains, objects in spatial gaming experiences can inherit digital ownership and attribution rights, allowing anyone to benefit from their contributions to an open ecosystem. Decentralized governance can also enable public consensus over which virtual objects can and cannot persist in a digital public space. This scenario is worth keeping an eye on given the significant concerns that centralization of digital public spaces might pose to the average consumer.
In either scenario, the aforementioned battle between Apple and Meta will go a long way towards determining how the creator ecosystem unfolds. Meta is certainly betting on its more open approach leading to greater community contributions. Apple’s early overtures to the development community have been much more restrictive in limiting the sorts of experiences that can be created (for example, prohibiting movement-based applications, including “apps that track body movements.”)
“From an open source perspective, I think a lot of developers don’t want those companies telling them what they can build either. So the question is, what is the ecosystem that gets built out around that? What are interesting new things? How much does that improve our products? I think there are lots of cases where if this ends up being like our databases or caching systems or architecture, we’ll get valuable contributions from the community that will make our stuff better. “
– Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO, MetaSource: Dwarkesh Podcast
If we refer back to our earlier discussion of the relationship between centralization and interconnectedness, we find yet another clue as to what the future might hold for spatial games.
We know that the average at-home gamer is increasingly able to access both spatial computing hardware and high quality, critically acclaimed single-player experiences, yet spatial gaming has still not “crossed the chasm” to mainstream markets.
If previous patterns hold true, we should expect future successes to stem from innovations in pro-social, networked multiplayer games rather than in marginal improvements to the single-player experience. Indeed, there are already indications of this from the titles currently dominating the Quest Store, such as the aforementioned Gorilla Tag, VR Chat, Rec Room, and other inherently social experiences.
Drilling down further, we believe that multiplayer games that appeal specifically to younger gamers as a “third place” (i.e. a space for socializing other than home or school) will have the largest potential in the spatial gaming marketplace.
We already know that Gen Z, for example, is likelier than other generational cohorts to cite gaming as its preferred form of entertainment (see chart below). We also know that 72% of teens play games to socialize with others and that nearly half have made new friends online by doing so (according to Pew Research).
Given that the broader spatial gaming market is still incipient, it’s safe to assume that young people will be among its earliest adopters, as they will be the first to benefit from expected increases in fidelity, improvements in comfort, and declines in price. Recent survey data indicates that already 33% of US teens own a VR device, with 13% of teens now using VR devices weekly.
“Older people don’t understand how much of a young person's thing VR is…[t]he Roblox generation is adopting VR very quickly and at much faster rates than adults.”
– Jack Southard, CEO / Co-Founder, Trass Games
Source: a16z
This familiarity with spatial computing will extend beyond the home to educational environments, too. The growing body of research showing positive outcomes related to experiential learning and the use of VR and AR in the classroom will continue to drive institutional adoption, further supporting platform and ecosystem growth. As more educational institutions adopt spatial computing technologies as part of their curricula, young people will grow up increasingly comfortable interacting with these technologies.
Taken as a whole, it stands to reason that the future tastemakers in spatial gaming will be those from Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and subsequent cohorts. These young gamers will be increasingly comfortable interacting with spatial computing applications, socializing within spatial games, and forming new connections that span both physical and digital realities. The experiences that lean into this trend will be most likely to drive and benefit from the future growth in spatial gaming.
One of the core ideas behind spatial gaming is that any real-world environment can serve as a blank canvas for immersive experiences. However, an often overlooked aspect of this is that many settings are simply not well-suited for gaming. Just as physical sports are best played in purpose-built spaces (fields, arenas, gymnasiums, etc.), so too will many spatial games require bespoke enclosures to deliver on their full immersive promises.
While spatial computing hardware will continue to shrink in size, we expect that certain aspects of spatial entertainment will still demand specialized equipment and spaces. Today’s devices can serve up convincing audio and visual experiences, but the other three senses (touch, smell, and taste) are largely ignored.[10] The sensation of physical movement is incredibly hard to replicate with head mounted devices alone, which is why many companies are already experimenting with novel approaches.
Take Disney and its Imagineering R&D Lab, for example, which has unveiled an omni-directional treadmill called the HoloTile floor that allows users to “walk” in any direction while remaining in place. These sorts of innovations will enable small physical spaces to expand into vast virtual worlds. Others experimenting in this area include EktoVR and Freeaim (for movement), TapXR and StrikerVR (for user inputs), or Haptx and MANUS (for haptics), to name just a few.
However, recalling our earlier discussion of the trade-offs between centralization and interconnectedness, it seems likely that some amount of centralization will need to occur for spatial gaming to continue its growth. Even if we account for the application of potential efficiencies to physical movement, other aspects of immersion will still require dedicated hardware either too large, complex, or expensive to be found in the average gamer’s home setup.
Companies like Sandbox VR and Zero Latency are already leading the charge in this area, repurposing large spaces to create spatial gaming environments akin to laser tag. These experiences serve as a bridge to full immersion, where players can move freely in large arenas, engaging in shared gaming adventures. In an interesting rhyme with gaming’s arcade-centric history, many of these are located in high foot traffic locations, such as shopping malls and tourist areas. For Sandbox VR, at least, that strategy appears to be working: the company has sold over 1.2 million tickets to date and expects to open 280 new locations in the next four years.
Theme parks, too, are playing a role in “re-centralizing” spatial gaming. Universal Studios’ Mario Kart ride, for example, uses AR glasses to create an interactive racing experience, allowing players to see virtual banana peels and red shells in their physical surroundings. Coincidentally, the company behind those headsets, Mira, was acquired by Apple in 2023.
Apple has also partnered with theme park giant Disney as part of its Vision Pro launch. Though no formal theme park integration has been announced, we shouldn’t discount the possibility of Disney creating its own spatial entertainment experiences in the future. These sorts of integrations can serve as ideal testing grounds for high-cost, high-fidelity spatial experiences that give visitors a taste of what’s possible in the world of spatial gaming without needing to own their own hardware.
As these technologies continue to evolve, we may one day see fully immersive, shared experiences that push the boundaries of virtual and physical worlds. Another interesting possibility here could be the emergence of a new sort of “esports” that merges the physical with the digital. In a similar manner to how Karate Combat is combining physical sport with Unreal Engine-enabled environments, we may one day see competitive spatial gaming produce its own unique blend of IRL athleticism with digital entertainment.
As we've journeyed through the past, present, and future of spatial gaming, one thing is clear: though the potential is immense, the industry is still waiting for its moment to truly take off. For developers, investors, and creators, there are important lessons to take from both the challenges and successes that have defined previous platform shifts. History shows us that major industry transitions rarely happen overnight. The success of consoles, for example, took over a decade to truly cement itself, and spatial computing may follow a similar path given the massive technological challenges still remaining.
Today, despite significant investments from companies like Apple and Meta, the market is still grappling with key obstacles: high hardware costs, niche user adoption, and limited availability of truly spatial-native content. Yet, this doesn't mean opportunity is nonexistent. In fact, it’s still early enough for a new cohort of spatial gaming creators to define their areas of expertise. Just as we’ve seen in other tech cycles, there’s an advantage in being early to market – especially when the competitive dynamics are still evolving. Apple and Meta are doubling down on their commitment to spatial computing and as the hardware and user experience improves, the commercial and creative opportunities available to aspiring creators will only grow.
One of the most exciting prospects for spatial gaming lies in how it can connect different domains, blurring the lines between gaming, art, sports, education, medicine, industry, and so much more. Developers from varied disciplines, including game designers, AI researchers, and scientists will come together to craft uniquely immersive experiences, while gamers, athletes, artists, and creators will converge in these new digital-physical worlds. Spatial computing offers the possibility of transforming everyday environments into interactive, playful spaces, allowing us to connect and interact in ways we’ve only dreamed of.
As we stand on the precipice of this shift, our advice to builders and innovators is simple: explore, play, and learn. The technology is still evolving, but the possibilities are vast. Whether you're a developer experimenting with spatial-native games, an investor in search of the next big opportunity, or simply someone curious about the future of interactive entertainment, now is the time to find your place in this emerging space. Spatial gaming may not have hit its inflection point yet, but when it does, those who have laid the groundwork will be best positioned to ride the wave.
Importantly, any projections broken out in this way will necessarily overstate the future for spatial gaming via double-counting (if you accept the premise that spatial gaming will be inclusive of both VR and AR technologies, rather than any mutually exclusive representation of either one).
Though this data comes from 2023, it is inclusive of sales projections for Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which launched in early February 2024.
A leak from early 2023 put the number over 20M for the entire Quest line prior to the release of the latest model, Quest 3. After Meta reported earnings in February 2024, estimates for the Quest 3, specifically, showed sales anywhere from 500K to 1.5M. The Quest 2 has also been heavily discounted, likely resulting in increased sales for that model.
It was widely reported that Apple Vision Pro also cut back on production due to low demand. However, this claim appears to have been debunked.
Note that here we are only considering dedicated AR hardware, meaning devices like smartphones and tablets would not be included.
These unit prices are admittedly cherry-picked for the sake of benchmarking; AR headsets range from $299 at the low end (XREAL Air; Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarers) to $5,000 and up for the HoloLens or Magic Leap.
By way of comparison, the PlayStation 5 alone sold more than 17M consoles in its first year, and is now well past 50M sold. This represents just one player in the three-headed gaming console market, which between Sony, Nintendo, and Xbox totaled more than
The games industry is in a state of flux.
Gamers, developers, and investors are navigating uncertainty, caught between excitement for innovation and skepticism from past disappointments. Amid this landscape, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and extended reality (XR) — collectively called "spatial computing" — are gaining renewed attention.
Companies like Apple and Meta are pouring billions into spatial computing hardware, pushing technological boundaries and prompting industries to explore new applications. The gaming industry, in particular, is keeping a close eye, speculating on these devices' potential as future platforms. However, despite significant investments and multiple product launches, spatial gaming has yet to become mainstream.
As optimists and fans of these technologies, we (Afo and Matt, here 👋) are excited by the recent interest. Yet, within the games industry, reception has been mixed. Past VR and AR hype cycles have led to overblown projections, leaving builders and investors hesitant to commit further resources. While Apple and Meta have invested heavily in R&D and content acquisition, broad consumer adoption remains elusive. Incumbent AAA publishers have largely abandoned VR/AR development, preferring to let startups explore this blue ocean before making a serious attempt at market entry. Gamers have also been slow to adopt, with price, form factor, and limited content acting as barriers.
Despite these challenges, spatial gaming optimists persist. Our hope is to offer a fresh perspective. We believe that there are still many unexplored and underexplored areas of game design, social interaction, and innovative monetization that a robust spatial gaming ecosystem might unearth. However, we also understand hesitation, current market data is either overly optimistic or underwhelming, providing no clear case for substantial investment.
To reconcile the idealized future of spatial gaming with present-day challenges, we decided to start at the beginning. Mapping spatial gaming's trajectory within the broader evolution of the gaming industry and envision where it might go. While technological improvements are still needed, we hope this analysis helps move us closer to a future where spatial gaming thrives.
Table of Contents:
How Platforms Shape Play
Elephants in the Room
Bulls, Bears & Benchmarking
Looking Ahead
In Conclusion
Endnotes
Note - As you may have inferred, we’ll be using the term “spatial gaming” throughout this report to describe gaming formats that broadly encompass VR, AR, and XR.
From its origins in bars and arcades to its ascension to PCs and consoles and its rapid spread to mobile devices, the games industry has undergone near constant change and disruption over the course of its 50+ years of development. Each of these shifts has not only transformed how and where games are played, but has also altered the balance between the centralization and interconnected play.
Despite ongoing change, the last major platform disruption occurred nearly 20 years ago with the rise of smartphones and app stores. Now, spatial computing has the potential to become a new platform, redefining how we experience the world through interactive entertainment by merging digital and physical realities.
To understand how spatial computing might impact the gaming industry, it's essential to examine the technological shifts that have shaped its history. By exploring prior platform shifts—from centralized arcade experiences to today's interconnected cross-platform games—we can better anticipate how spatial computing might drive the next evolution in gaming.
In the 1970s, arcades were the epicenter of gaming. They offered a communal space where players gathered to play, compete, and socialize. The centralized nature of arcades meant that gaming was often a shared experience, with the physical space playing a crucial role in how games were consumed. This was partly a result of the practical realities of the time: arcade cabinets were too expensive and bulky for the vast majority of consumers to be able to access at home. As a result, game publishers sought to offset these costs by placing their products in centralized public spaces with high foot traffic and a natural inclination to social interaction: locations like bars, shopping malls, and bowling alleys.
However, this centralized model began to shift as companies like Atari, Magnavox, and Coleco began to release the first generation of consoles built for at-home use. This marked the beginning of a new era where gaming steadily shifted away from public spaces and into the privacy of the home.
As the home console market began to boast major successes like the Atari 2600 and the Nintendo Entertainment System, players increasingly gained the ability to enjoy gaming on their own terms. This shift decentralized access to games, making it more accessible to a broader audience, but with the added effect of isolating the experience.
Instead of potentially reaching anyone walking through a mall, home consoles restricted a game’s audience to the number of controllers that could be plugged into a device. Instead of competing for a few quarters from everyone in an arcade, games now needed to compete for as many dollars as possible from the smaller number of households able to afford a console.
The increasing focus on solo experiences resulted in all manner of innovations in single-player design: improved graphics, richer narratives, and grander experiences. Content flourished, exploring countless new genres and storytelling devices. Hardware, however, seemed only to improve in terms of technical performance. Though many of the technical breakthroughs in arcades still informed PC and console development for years to come, gaming would only further cement itself as an at-home activity, marketed primarily to kids and teens.
As technological improvements plateaued, game developers struggled to push the boundaries of immersion beyond the TV set and into the real world. That’s not to imply that they didn’t try, though. Even in those early days, there were glimmers of what we might now recognize as nascent forms of spatial computing. Nintendo, for example, experimented with peripherals like the Power Glove and Virtual Boy; devices that aimed to bring a new level of physical interaction and immersion to gaming, albeit with limited success.
These early attempts at spatial gaming highlighted both the challenges and potential of integrating physical space into digital play. While the technology of the time couldn’t fully realize these ambitions, it helped to lay the groundwork for the future: a time when spatial computing might finally deliver on the promise of immersive, physically integrated gaming experiences without sacrificing the communal and social qualities of gaming’s earliest days.
The explosion of mobile gaming in the early 2000s was another transformative era for the industry. Though handheld devices like the Game Boy had already introduced the idea of portable gaming to the masses, it was the advent of smartphones (in particular, the iPhone and its App Store) that truly unshackled mobile gaming. Suddenly, anyone with a smartphone could access a vast array of games – anywhere, at any time – putting interactive entertainment into the hands of billions of people around the world.
This shift didn’t just change where games were played, but also how they were designed. The touch interface of smartphones introduced new forms of interaction, moving away from traditional controllers and buttons to more direct manipulation of on-screen elements. In a way, this can be viewed as a precursor to the types of interactions we see in today’s early spatial computing applications, where hand tracking and gesture control are increasingly pivotal to the gaming experience.
Moreover, mobile gaming's emphasis on accessibility and portability directly parallels the goals of spatial computing. Just as mobile games made interactive entertainment a ubiquitous part of daily life – through its short sessions and its integrations with Bluetooth, cameras, GPS, and other smartphone hardware – spatial computing has the potential to integrate gaming even more seamlessly into our everyday environments. Through its ability to transform nearly any physical space into an interactive play area, or even to create virtual screens out of thin air, spatial computing promises to make interfacing with digital realities feel as natural as interacting with the physical world around you.
Today, the games industry is a cultural and economic behemoth. Gaming can be found on all manner of fixed and portable devices, stretching the limits of immersion and accessibility in every direction.
On one end of the spectrum, today’s high-end interactive entertainment compares favorably with feature films, showcasing in-depth storytelling, engrossing virtual worlds, and IPs that are rapidly crossing over to more traditional forms of linear entertainment. At the same time, the games industry is also host to several massively successful “games” that might be more accurately described as digital “third places” for players to make friends and hang out, where the “game” itself is a secondary concern.
“[B]y providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new ‘‘third place’’ for informal sociability. Participation in such virtual ‘‘third places’’ appears particularly well suited to the formation of bridging social capital—social relationships that, while not usually providing deep emotional support, typically function to expose the individual to a diversity of worldviews.”
– Constance A. Steinkuehler & Dmitri Williams
Source: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places”)
What’s more, we’ve even seen games converge with IRL experiences, combining social design with physical presence. The most widely played of these has been Pokémon GO – an “AR” game that is not really AR-native at all, but more accurately described as a location-based game with AR overlays. Labels aside, Pokémon GO and titles like it have shown the potential for what can be achieved at the intersection of physical and virtual realities.
In the nearly twenty years since the first iPhone was released, the commercial and cultural significance of gaming has attracted massive amounts of investment and talent to the space. This has resulted in a host of creative and technological innovations in areas complementary to gaming:
Ubiquitous Internet connectivity, GPS, and AR cameras have combined to allow games to expand beyond the boundaries of homes and arcades and out into the broader physical world.
Haptic feedback and motion controls – two sets of technologies that have steadily improved through their use in both console and mobile games – have allowed game developers to improve immersion, unlock new forms of user input, and experiment with novel game designs.
Cloud computing has demonstrated that gaming can be untethered from high-powered machines, allowing gamers to focus on the experience rather than the device.
Though many of these technological advances have struggled to commercialize and stand on their own as sustainable businesses, they collectively represent an increasingly robust set of technologies available for forthcoming generations of game developers to combine and reimagine in the context of spatial computing.
The lines between digital worlds and physical realities are rapidly blurring. In this context, spatial computing represents more than just the next potential gaming platform: it is the culmination of all the previous innovations that have come before it.
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, though, let’s quickly review the present state of the spatial gaming market. This will give us an idea of what’s working today, where the technology is falling short, and where we should expect future innovation to come from.
It’s worth taking a brief digression to acknowledge the current incumbents in the spatial computing ecosystem: Apple and Meta.
Though there are other players competing at the periphery (ByteDance, Valve, and Sony, to name a few), the importance of Meta and Apple in the race for spatial computing dominance cannot be overstated. They represent two differing – and in many ways, diametrically opposed – views on this emerging set of technologies. It seems likely that the hardware and platform infrastructure being built by these giants of Silicon Valley will define the landscape of spatial computing for years to come.
Apple is no stranger to making waves in emerging industries. The company has sought to redefine how we view and interact with technology dating back to the release of its first Macintosh computer.
Apple is not in the business of creating new technology, but rather redefining how we interact with it. It didn’t make the first PCs, smartphones, or tablets, but reimagined how they could be used and experienced. With its Vision Pro, Apple is once again attempting to step into an existing field of technology, flip the table upside down, and paint it anew.
Consumer experience comes first at Apple. While some may feel the company has strayed from Steve Jobs’ initial vision, Apple’s products still largely adhere to the company’s classic slogan from the 90’s: “Think Different.” Apple products are not merely focused on productivity, but on how consumers perceive and interact with the world around them. With that in mind, Apple’s Vision Pro offers the company one of its largest canvases yet with which to craft unique experiences.
Despite its best intentions, however, Apple’s present approach to spatial computing is far from perfect. Early reviews for the Vision Pro praised the device for its sense of immersion, its high level of fidelity, and its innovative approach to eye and hand tracking, but the headset still left a lot to be desired in terms of battery life, device weight, app ecosystem and overall affordability. In terms of spatial gaming apps, specifically, the selection was meager. The company touted just twelve “unique spatial games” at launch, several of which were ports of existing VR games.
As a result of these shortcomings, the early results for Apple have been disappointing, with both consumers and developers slow to adopt the expensive new product. According to research firm IDC, the company is expected to sell fewer than 400,000 units in its first year.
Further dampening optimism around the Apple Vision Pro’s launch has been the tepid response from the game development community. According to a damning report from MobileGamer.biz, developers have struggled with the lack of technical support from Apple, the absence of financial incentives offered for building games on the platform, and the difficulties of discoverability once a game is eventually released, among several other gripes.
“Developing for Vision Pro is like going back in time 10 years because despite the advertised power – and the cost – it is not a machine built for gaming. Getting any complex games working on the platform is difficult.”
— Apple Vision Pro developer
Source: MobileGamer.biz
At the time of this report, it remains to be seen how Apple will react to these challenges. It has long been speculated that the Vision Pro represents only the company’s first foray into spatial computing, with more affordable consumer-oriented models on the horizon. Whether future iterations will result in improvements to the gaming ecosystem remains to be seen, but it seems far too early to count Apple out just yet.
For all the innovation and man hours that Apple has put into the research, development, and launch of its Vision Pro, its overall investment in spatial computing hardware may still fall short of that of its rival, Meta.
The tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp has poured tens of billions of dollars into its Reality Labs division over the last several years, netting losses equivalent to the combined market caps of some of its social media rivals. Expenditure first began to meaningfully increase in 2018 and 2019, growing exponentially in subsequent years. The company formerly known as Facebook officially rebranded itself to Meta in late 2021, solidifying its intentions to create “The Metaverse” and signaling to investors and competitors alike just how serious CEO Mark Zuckerberg was about an idea that many took to be little more than a passing fad.
Meta’s spatial computing ambitions can be traced back to 2014, when it spent $2B to acquire VR headset pioneers Oculus. Having infamously missed out on the prior generation of hardware innovation (the smartphone), Meta’s bet at the time of the Oculus acquisition was to leapfrog other established hardware manufacturers. The company hoped that building in a blue ocean – the nascent field of virtual reality – would provide it the competitive flexibility to develop a cohesive, vertically integrated experience that would be supported and augmented by its existing suite of social media applications, advertising solutions, and communications tools.
After early releases failed to take hold, however, the company was forced to rethink its approach. Like Apple, Meta’s inaugural product offering displayed impressive technological achievements for its time, but failed to meaningfully expand the market (the first Meta Quest headset is estimated to have sold only about 1M units).
These early speedbumps resulted in interesting strategic decisions from Meta. The first of these was a shift away from enterprise and productivity use cases, opting instead to prioritize gaming applications. The company brought on several experienced gaming executives in its effort to build a VR gaming powerhouse, including hiring legendary game developer and co-founder of id Software, John Carmack, as CTO of Oculus. Meta’s gaming focus also led it to acquire several game development studios, including Sanzaru Games (developers of the Asgard’s Wrath series of VR titles), Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR), Camouflaj (Iron Man VR), and Beat Games (Beat Saber), among others.
Meta clearly intended to establish a foundation of leading gaming content to populate its nascent VR app ecosystem. However, any winning platform inevitably requires a supportive developer ecosystem to flesh out its library of content. This fact led Meta to its second and perhaps most significant move: the decision to open its operating system to third-party hardware makers.
This stands in stark contrast to Apple’s traditional “walled garden” approach and sets up a similar dynamic to what played out in the mobile ecosystem between iOS and Android. To quote Zuckerberg himself:
“[I]n every era of computing, there are always open and closed models. Apple’s closed model basically won out. Phones are tightly controlled and you’re kind of locked into what they’ll let you do. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the PC era, the open model won out. You can do a lot more things, install mods. You got more diversity of hardware, software and more.
So our goal is to make it so the open model defines the next generation of computing again with the Metaverse, glasses, and headsets. That’s why we’re releasing our operating systems so that more companies can build different things on it.”
– Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO, Meta
Source: Instagram
Working with a variety of third-party developers will allow all hardware manufacturers to focus on narrower use cases (e.g. gaming, education, industrial, and enterprise use cases, etc.), rather than forcing Meta to create a headset that appeals to everyone.
We have already begun to see this play out in the company’s latest hardware lineup. Meta’s Quest 3 model has taken a leap forward by introducing mixed reality and full-color passthrough, offering users a broader spectrum of immersion than all-out virtual reality. Its Meta Ray-Bans AR device takes this a step further, bringing spatial computing to a more mainstream, casual audience. The company has also previewed additional specialized devices from ASUS and Lenovo for gaming and enterprise use cases, respectively, as well as a prototype of its Orion AR glasses, targeting a 2027 launch.
Though it’s far too early to call Meta the winner of the spatial computing race, it is the clear leader today. Let’s take a look at the available data to get a clearer picture.
In the following pages, we will take a look at the publicly available data on spatial gaming and seek to draw our own conclusions about the state of the market today.
Whether you believe spatial computing is at the beginning of an exponential curve or in the midst of yet another industry hype cycle, our hope is that by providing a data-forward approach we will be able to help readers clarify their own positions (and perhaps even change some minds in the process).
There are two major components to understanding the spatial gaming market: hardware and content. We can further subdivide these into VR and AR, since most research providers have not broadly adopted the terms “spatial gaming” or “spatial computing.”[1]
On the hardware front, adoption has lagged behind other gaming formats. Research firm Omdia has reported that VR headset sales have actually been falling for the last two years and forecasts that trend to continue through 2025.[2] Another report from IDC shows a similar figure for 2023 sales (7.6M to Omdia’s 7.7M), though it comes in much more optimistic on future prospects with a predicted 21.9M headsets shipped in 2027.
The majority of these sales can likely be attributed to the Meta Quest. Venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz claims that more than 30M Quests have been sold to date, based on estimates derived from app downloads. According to AR Insider, “Meta famously doesn’t provide sales numbers,” though the estimate seems plausible.[3]
Other major competitors include the aforementioned Apple Vision Pro, Sony’s PSVR line of headsets, and ByteDance’s Pico. However, all of these trail Meta in market share and two of the three (PSVR and Pico) have been subject to cutbacks or reductions.[4]
Unsurprisingly, AR hardware is even less widespread. Examples in this category include the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Microsoft’s HoloLens, XREAL’s Air2, and the Magic Leap 2, among others.[5]
Reliable publicly available data is hard to come by here, given the specialized nature of the devices and the overlap with VR headsets. Statista Market Insights estimates the worldwide revenue totals for AR hardware to be $6.3B in 2024. If we assume an average sale price between $500 and $1,000, that would put us anywhere from ~6.3M to 12.6M units sold across the entire ecosystem.[6]
However, even conservative estimates here seem overstated. The Wall Street Journal added another data point in 2023 when it reported that Meta had sold only 300,000 of its Meta Ray-Ban Stories (the first generation of its AR glasses) in the roughly year and a half since launching the product line. It went on to report that the company only had about 27,000 monthly active users (MAU) and that Meta had projected between 394,000 and 478,000 unit sales for the entire lifetime of Ray-Ban Stories.
Despite all of the above, two major challenges remain unaddressed. First, these unit sales forecasts pale in comparison to the dominant gaming form factors of today. Though spatial computing is still in its nascency, it has a long way to go from a sales perspective to become competitive.[7]
Second, and perhaps most importantly, these rough sizing exercises only take unit sales into consideration; they do not account for actual user engagement with spatial computing devices. Gaming companies compete not only on sales, but on the share of users’ engagement time that they are able to monopolize. When engagement is factored in, the realistic addressable market for VR and AR content today is likely far smaller than hardware sales might otherwise indicate.
“Content is king,” as the saying goes. Indeed, flagship content and IP are the engines powering most, if not all incumbent gaming platforms today. Despite this, the so-called “killer app” thesis has yet to unfold for spatial gaming. This idea – that a truly valuable or compelling application will drive meaningful platform adoption – has simply not proven true for VR and AR hardware. There are several reasons why this may be the case.[8],[9]
The first and most obvious argument why there has not been a killer spatial gaming app yet is that there simply aren’t any quality products. This, however, is easily refuted. Though many VR and AR games lack the polish of the high-budget AAA console and PC titles that gamers are accustomed to, there are still several critically acclaimed titles available on the market.
On the VR front, titles such as Valve’s Half-Life Alyx (currently sitting at a 93 Metacritic score as of this writing), fantasy epic Asgard’s Wrath II (87 Metacritic), and streamer favorite Beat Saber (86 Metacritic) are all widely hailed as fun, compelling gaming experiences. There are also several popular games from other platforms that have made their way to VR: Roblox, Superhot, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Among Us, to name just a few. Heck, EA’s VR adaptation of Medal of Honor even won an Academy Award.
We can also quickly dispel the notion that there are no compelling IPs available in VR. Beyond the established gaming franchises just mentioned, we can also point to others like The Walking Dead, Star Wars, Resident Evil, Horizon Zero Dawn, John Wick, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Pokémon, and many more well known properties that have tried their hands at creating experiences for this new medium.
“We have been a bit disappointed by what we were able to achieve on VR with Assassin’s Creed. It did OK, and it continues to sell, but we thought it would sell more, so we're not increasing our investment on VR at the moment because it needs to take off.”
– Yves Guillemot, CEO, UbisoftSource: GameRant
AR has also had its fair share of notable franchises attempt to create a killer app, including Pokémon, Harry Potter, Jurassic World, Minecraft, and Angry Birds, to name a few. Though the aforementioned Pokémon GO has been a massive commercial success, all other attempts have struggled to find traction. Even if we consider these proper AR apps (a debatable assertion), it’s hard to argue that they have driven any sort of hardware adoption on their own.
Yet, despite the lack of true breakout hits, we should not assume that spatial gaming holds no commercial opportunity for pure-play content developers. On the contrary, the business opportunity for game makers may be larger than ever before.
According to Meta’s Director of Content Ecosystem, Chris Pruett, the Quest store has “made over $2B in sales by 2023” and features “over 40 titles [that] have generated $10M+ in revenue.” It was recently revealed that Another Axiom, developers of breakout success Gorilla Tag, is among those titles. The game has pulled in a whopping $100M+ in lifetime revenue with an average playtime of nearly 60 minutes.
While it is true that one successful game (or even 40) does not validate a successful platform, these data points are, at minimum, indicative of the potential to generate meaningful returns with winning VR content. Layer in additional future growth in the hardware install base and deepening of its user engagement profiles and suddenly those returns become more compelling. At least one outlet, research firm ALDORA, has estimated that the VR market “shows room for growth,” predicting an 11% increase through 2025.
Another area of spatial computing that has already found traction is in B2C commercial applications of AR. Mobile AR, specifically, has been adopted by many consumer brands as a means to preview purchases, digitally interact with products, and amplify immersion during the shopping experience. This is obviously not a gaming application, but it is yet another proof point that these emerging technologies can be effectively monetized at scale.
“Mobile AR revenue is projected to grow from $10.5 billion in 2023 to $21.5 billion in 2028. In fact, mobile AR revenue today exceeds other XR sectors we track, such as headworn AR and VR, as it piggybacks on a global base of 3.6 billion smartphones.”
– ARtilleryIQ, spatial computing research firmSource: ARtilleryIQ
Spatial computing applications clearly have the capability to be both critically acclaimed and commercially viable. We have seen multiple instances of this in different branches of spatial computing – some in head-worn VR, some in mobile AR – but few, if any game developers have been able to bring it all together into one standout spatial gaming experience. This state of affairs remains the status quo today, despite the licensing of major gaming and entertainment IPs, despite repeated attempts from experienced AAA game developers, and despite billions of dollars of investment in hardware research and development.
So, what’s missing? How does spatial gaming evolve from here?
We believe that there’s tremendous untapped potential in spatial gaming. We expect to see meaningful improvements to both hardware and content, which should be further augmented by the rapid development of complementary technologies like generative AI. The next wave of spatial games has the opportunity to establish a new foundation upon which novel immersive ecosystems can grow and thrive.
Of course, no one has a crystal ball, but we do have some clues as to what might work. We have bucketed our forward-looking predictions into the following four loose categories:
Spatial-Native Games
The UGC Economy
Third Place for Youth
Re-Centralization
The logical place to begin when predicting the future of spatial gaming is to consider which types of games are intrinsic to spatial environments and thus unable to be reproduced on traditional platforms: what we’ll refer to here as spatial-native games. These experiences blend physical activity and environmental interaction with games or game-like mechanics, taking full advantage of the unique capabilities of spatial computing to create immersive mixed reality experiences.
“Success stories in every new network will be homegrown—the opportunity/switching cost for would-be emigrants established on other platforms is too high.”
– Chris Paik, Investor, Pace CapitalSource: Every
We’re already seeing early examples of this thesis start to emerge. Experiences such as PianoVision, which combines rhythm gaming with piano instruction, are adding layers of interactivity to traditionally solitary practices. Other projects like Flaivor and PencilXR are exploring similar approaches to cooking and drawing, respectively.
While most attempts in this area are currently focused on skill building and ease of use, historical precedent suggests that meaningful businesses can be built on top of these applications through the addition of features like leaderboards, streaks, goal-setting, and social reinforcement, among others. Apps like Duolingo, Daylio, and Finch have shown the power of gamification in a two-dimensional world, while companies like Strava and Zwift have already pushed into three dimensions. Spatial computing will level up these experiences in entirely new ways.
Additionally, as spatial computing hardware shrinks, more casual form factors like Meta’s Ray Ban or Orion glasses will enable gamified experiences in everyday settings. Whether it’s collecting items in a museum, turning a walk in nature into an unexpected adventure, or gathering with strangers at a park to take down a raid boss, nearly any setting can be transformed into a spatial gaming experience.
It’s worth noting that the tabletop gaming genre has been an early adopter of this spatial-native approach, as evidenced by companies like Tilt Five and Mirrorscape. Though these platforms come with their own set of limitations (dedicated game boards and headsets in Tilt Five’s case; a lack of controllers or hand manipulation for Mirrorscape), they further demonstrate the broad potential of spatial gaming.
As spatial gaming begins to take off, a corresponding demand for content to fill those gaming experiences will follow. The 3D models, environment art, visual effects, and other assets that bring these worlds to life will all need to be created and deployed to a near-limitless variety of physical spaces.
While some of this will inevitably derive from game developers themselves, the sheer volume of content required leads us to believe that a robust user-generated content (UGC) and modding scene will emerge around spatial gaming. This movement will be both supported and supercharged by several complementary technologies, such as generative AI, photogrammetry, volumetric video, and blockchains.
We can already see incumbent UGC platforms and VR creation tools implementing this tech into their offerings. Companies like Roblox and Rec Room are actively incorporating generative AI into developer tooling, making it easier for creators of all levels to quickly generate high-quality experiences across platforms and in real time. Epic Games, creators of Unreal Engine, has been a leader in photogrammetry and volumetric capture, incorporating tools like RealityScan into its industry-leading suite of game development tools. Unreal competitor Unity has also been active in both photogrammetry and AI. We’re even seeing ambitious AI companies emerge to meet the need for so-called “spatial intelligence,” to borrow a term from the recently unveiled World Labs.
We believe AI-powered content creation will revolutionize how gamers and creators interact with spatial worlds. The young creators getting started with these tools today will become the seasoned AR and VR developers of tomorrow.
Imagine using generative AI to build a castle in your living room, with the combination of LLMs and AR tools adapting the castle’s structure to the room's dimensions and layout on the fly. What seems cutting edge to us today will soon be a typical means of creation for the future builders of spatial gaming.
Other innovations will need to occur on the backend, too. For spatial gaming experiences to persist across sessions and users in public spaces across the world, one or more layers of ubiquitous virtual positioning systems will need to emerge. Data storage, permissions, moderation, and so on will all need to be solved. One possibility is that this may come from a centralized offering, such as Niantic’s Lightship SDK (though as you’ll see in the image below, coverage still has a long way to go).
Another possibility is the emergence of a decentralized offering supported by blockchain technology. By leveraging blockchains, objects in spatial gaming experiences can inherit digital ownership and attribution rights, allowing anyone to benefit from their contributions to an open ecosystem. Decentralized governance can also enable public consensus over which virtual objects can and cannot persist in a digital public space. This scenario is worth keeping an eye on given the significant concerns that centralization of digital public spaces might pose to the average consumer.
In either scenario, the aforementioned battle between Apple and Meta will go a long way towards determining how the creator ecosystem unfolds. Meta is certainly betting on its more open approach leading to greater community contributions. Apple’s early overtures to the development community have been much more restrictive in limiting the sorts of experiences that can be created (for example, prohibiting movement-based applications, including “apps that track body movements.”)
“From an open source perspective, I think a lot of developers don’t want those companies telling them what they can build either. So the question is, what is the ecosystem that gets built out around that? What are interesting new things? How much does that improve our products? I think there are lots of cases where if this ends up being like our databases or caching systems or architecture, we’ll get valuable contributions from the community that will make our stuff better. “
– Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO, MetaSource: Dwarkesh Podcast
If we refer back to our earlier discussion of the relationship between centralization and interconnectedness, we find yet another clue as to what the future might hold for spatial games.
We know that the average at-home gamer is increasingly able to access both spatial computing hardware and high quality, critically acclaimed single-player experiences, yet spatial gaming has still not “crossed the chasm” to mainstream markets.
If previous patterns hold true, we should expect future successes to stem from innovations in pro-social, networked multiplayer games rather than in marginal improvements to the single-player experience. Indeed, there are already indications of this from the titles currently dominating the Quest Store, such as the aforementioned Gorilla Tag, VR Chat, Rec Room, and other inherently social experiences.
Drilling down further, we believe that multiplayer games that appeal specifically to younger gamers as a “third place” (i.e. a space for socializing other than home or school) will have the largest potential in the spatial gaming marketplace.
We already know that Gen Z, for example, is likelier than other generational cohorts to cite gaming as its preferred form of entertainment (see chart below). We also know that 72% of teens play games to socialize with others and that nearly half have made new friends online by doing so (according to Pew Research).
Given that the broader spatial gaming market is still incipient, it’s safe to assume that young people will be among its earliest adopters, as they will be the first to benefit from expected increases in fidelity, improvements in comfort, and declines in price. Recent survey data indicates that already 33% of US teens own a VR device, with 13% of teens now using VR devices weekly.
“Older people don’t understand how much of a young person's thing VR is…[t]he Roblox generation is adopting VR very quickly and at much faster rates than adults.”
– Jack Southard, CEO / Co-Founder, Trass Games
Source: a16z
This familiarity with spatial computing will extend beyond the home to educational environments, too. The growing body of research showing positive outcomes related to experiential learning and the use of VR and AR in the classroom will continue to drive institutional adoption, further supporting platform and ecosystem growth. As more educational institutions adopt spatial computing technologies as part of their curricula, young people will grow up increasingly comfortable interacting with these technologies.
Taken as a whole, it stands to reason that the future tastemakers in spatial gaming will be those from Gen Z, Gen Alpha, and subsequent cohorts. These young gamers will be increasingly comfortable interacting with spatial computing applications, socializing within spatial games, and forming new connections that span both physical and digital realities. The experiences that lean into this trend will be most likely to drive and benefit from the future growth in spatial gaming.
One of the core ideas behind spatial gaming is that any real-world environment can serve as a blank canvas for immersive experiences. However, an often overlooked aspect of this is that many settings are simply not well-suited for gaming. Just as physical sports are best played in purpose-built spaces (fields, arenas, gymnasiums, etc.), so too will many spatial games require bespoke enclosures to deliver on their full immersive promises.
While spatial computing hardware will continue to shrink in size, we expect that certain aspects of spatial entertainment will still demand specialized equipment and spaces. Today’s devices can serve up convincing audio and visual experiences, but the other three senses (touch, smell, and taste) are largely ignored.[10] The sensation of physical movement is incredibly hard to replicate with head mounted devices alone, which is why many companies are already experimenting with novel approaches.
Take Disney and its Imagineering R&D Lab, for example, which has unveiled an omni-directional treadmill called the HoloTile floor that allows users to “walk” in any direction while remaining in place. These sorts of innovations will enable small physical spaces to expand into vast virtual worlds. Others experimenting in this area include EktoVR and Freeaim (for movement), TapXR and StrikerVR (for user inputs), or Haptx and MANUS (for haptics), to name just a few.
However, recalling our earlier discussion of the trade-offs between centralization and interconnectedness, it seems likely that some amount of centralization will need to occur for spatial gaming to continue its growth. Even if we account for the application of potential efficiencies to physical movement, other aspects of immersion will still require dedicated hardware either too large, complex, or expensive to be found in the average gamer’s home setup.
Companies like Sandbox VR and Zero Latency are already leading the charge in this area, repurposing large spaces to create spatial gaming environments akin to laser tag. These experiences serve as a bridge to full immersion, where players can move freely in large arenas, engaging in shared gaming adventures. In an interesting rhyme with gaming’s arcade-centric history, many of these are located in high foot traffic locations, such as shopping malls and tourist areas. For Sandbox VR, at least, that strategy appears to be working: the company has sold over 1.2 million tickets to date and expects to open 280 new locations in the next four years.
Theme parks, too, are playing a role in “re-centralizing” spatial gaming. Universal Studios’ Mario Kart ride, for example, uses AR glasses to create an interactive racing experience, allowing players to see virtual banana peels and red shells in their physical surroundings. Coincidentally, the company behind those headsets, Mira, was acquired by Apple in 2023.
Apple has also partnered with theme park giant Disney as part of its Vision Pro launch. Though no formal theme park integration has been announced, we shouldn’t discount the possibility of Disney creating its own spatial entertainment experiences in the future. These sorts of integrations can serve as ideal testing grounds for high-cost, high-fidelity spatial experiences that give visitors a taste of what’s possible in the world of spatial gaming without needing to own their own hardware.
As these technologies continue to evolve, we may one day see fully immersive, shared experiences that push the boundaries of virtual and physical worlds. Another interesting possibility here could be the emergence of a new sort of “esports” that merges the physical with the digital. In a similar manner to how Karate Combat is combining physical sport with Unreal Engine-enabled environments, we may one day see competitive spatial gaming produce its own unique blend of IRL athleticism with digital entertainment.
As we've journeyed through the past, present, and future of spatial gaming, one thing is clear: though the potential is immense, the industry is still waiting for its moment to truly take off. For developers, investors, and creators, there are important lessons to take from both the challenges and successes that have defined previous platform shifts. History shows us that major industry transitions rarely happen overnight. The success of consoles, for example, took over a decade to truly cement itself, and spatial computing may follow a similar path given the massive technological challenges still remaining.
Today, despite significant investments from companies like Apple and Meta, the market is still grappling with key obstacles: high hardware costs, niche user adoption, and limited availability of truly spatial-native content. Yet, this doesn't mean opportunity is nonexistent. In fact, it’s still early enough for a new cohort of spatial gaming creators to define their areas of expertise. Just as we’ve seen in other tech cycles, there’s an advantage in being early to market – especially when the competitive dynamics are still evolving. Apple and Meta are doubling down on their commitment to spatial computing and as the hardware and user experience improves, the commercial and creative opportunities available to aspiring creators will only grow.
One of the most exciting prospects for spatial gaming lies in how it can connect different domains, blurring the lines between gaming, art, sports, education, medicine, industry, and so much more. Developers from varied disciplines, including game designers, AI researchers, and scientists will come together to craft uniquely immersive experiences, while gamers, athletes, artists, and creators will converge in these new digital-physical worlds. Spatial computing offers the possibility of transforming everyday environments into interactive, playful spaces, allowing us to connect and interact in ways we’ve only dreamed of.
As we stand on the precipice of this shift, our advice to builders and innovators is simple: explore, play, and learn. The technology is still evolving, but the possibilities are vast. Whether you're a developer experimenting with spatial-native games, an investor in search of the next big opportunity, or simply someone curious about the future of interactive entertainment, now is the time to find your place in this emerging space. Spatial gaming may not have hit its inflection point yet, but when it does, those who have laid the groundwork will be best positioned to ride the wave.
Importantly, any projections broken out in this way will necessarily overstate the future for spatial gaming via double-counting (if you accept the premise that spatial gaming will be inclusive of both VR and AR technologies, rather than any mutually exclusive representation of either one).
Though this data comes from 2023, it is inclusive of sales projections for Apple’s Vision Pro headset, which launched in early February 2024.
A leak from early 2023 put the number over 20M for the entire Quest line prior to the release of the latest model, Quest 3. After Meta reported earnings in February 2024, estimates for the Quest 3, specifically, showed sales anywhere from 500K to 1.5M. The Quest 2 has also been heavily discounted, likely resulting in increased sales for that model.
It was widely reported that Apple Vision Pro also cut back on production due to low demand. However, this claim appears to have been debunked.
Note that here we are only considering dedicated AR hardware, meaning devices like smartphones and tablets would not be included.
These unit prices are admittedly cherry-picked for the sake of benchmarking; AR headsets range from $299 at the low end (XREAL Air; Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarers) to $5,000 and up for the HoloLens or Magic Leap.
By way of comparison, the PlayStation 5 alone sold more than 17M consoles in its first year, and is now well past 50M sold. This represents just one player in the three-headed gaming console market, which between Sony, Nintendo, and Xbox totaled more than
Here we will ignore any potential hardware issues (such as form factor, eye and head fatigue, battery life, and so on) that may play a role in order to focus solely on the content side of the equation. Hardware concerns are both significant and noteworthy, but apply more or less equally to all spatial gaming content today.
We also assume for the sake of this discussion that the killer spatial computing app (if one ever does emerge) will be a game. This is, of course, not necessarily a given, but since gaming is the focus of this report we will limit our discussion to interactive entertainment. Besides, if there had indeed already been a killer non-gaming app, we would have seen its presence reflected in hardware adoption.
While it’s possible that something like neurogaming (via brain-computer interface or similar technologies) may one day enable us to experience simulated senses beyond the audio-visual, this seems at least to be many years away from reality.
Here we will ignore any potential hardware issues (such as form factor, eye and head fatigue, battery life, and so on) that may play a role in order to focus solely on the content side of the equation. Hardware concerns are both significant and noteworthy, but apply more or less equally to all spatial gaming content today.
We also assume for the sake of this discussion that the killer spatial computing app (if one ever does emerge) will be a game. This is, of course, not necessarily a given, but since gaming is the focus of this report we will limit our discussion to interactive entertainment. Besides, if there had indeed already been a killer non-gaming app, we would have seen its presence reflected in hardware adoption.
While it’s possible that something like neurogaming (via brain-computer interface or similar technologies) may one day enable us to experience simulated senses beyond the audio-visual, this seems at least to be many years away from reality.
6 comments
Curious about the state of spatial gaming checkout a piece written by friend and I where we explore: 🕹️ How Platforms Shape Play 🐘 Elephants in the Room (Apple & Meta) 📈 Bulls, Bears & Benchmarking 🔮 Looking Ahead (The Future of Spatial Games) https://blog.wefa.world/the-road-ahead-for-spatial-gaming
Excited to share my first article on Spatial Gaming! 🙏💜 I’d love thoughts and feedback. Here’s what it covers: 🕹️ How Platforms Shape Play 🐘 Elephants in the Room (Apple & Meta) 📈 Bulls, Bears & Benchmarking 🔮 Looking Ahead (The Future of Spatial Games) https://blog.wefa.world/the-road-ahead-for-spatial-gaming
Excited to share my first article on Spatial Gaming! 🙏💜 I’d love thoughts and feedback. Here’s what it covers: 🕹️ How Platforms Shape Play 🐘 Elephants in the Room (Apple & Meta) 📈 Bulls, Bears & Benchmarking 🔮 Looking Ahead (The Future of Spatial Games) https://blog.wefa.world/the-road-ahead-for-spatial-gaming
Congrats on publishing your first article on Spatial Gaming! 🙌💜 Can’t wait to check it out—I'll definitely share my thoughts! Thanks for putting this together!"
Excited to share my first article on Spatial Gaming! 🙏💜 I’d love thoughts and feedback. Here’s what it covers: 🕹️ How Platforms Shape Play 🐘 Elephants in the Room (Apple & Meta) 📈 Bulls, Bears & Benchmarking 🔮 Looking Ahead (The Future of Spatial Games) https://blog.wefa.world/the-road-ahead-for-spatial-gaming
Checkout this article a friend and I have written on the spatial gaming space! https://blog.wefa.world/the-road-ahead-for-spatial-gaming