Meta's director of VR games, Chris Pruett, believes that today's teenagers playing GorillaTag will continue to use VR as they grow older. "It's a pretty tough time for the gaming industry," Pruett said during his annual GDC State of VR keynote. "I've been in the industry for almost 30 years. This is the toughest time I've ever seen."
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“It’s tough for everyone,” he added. “It’s tough for VR. We’re not immune.” Pruett made these statements two months after Meta’s decision to lay off more than 1,000 VR-related employees and significantly reduce first-party game development. “We closed a lot of our studios,” he acknowledged. “And make no mistake: They were top-notch studios.” Meta’s significant cuts have caused concern among VR developers, especially since many third-party studios have also experienced layoffs.
Revenue at the Quest store grew slightly in 2025, Pruett said. But much of the medium’s growth has been driven by free-to-play games like GorillaTag and UG, which are popular with young teens who have little cash on hand. Even older hardcore VR gamers “are not spending as much as they used to,” Pruett admitted. But he offered hope for desperate VR developers: GorillaTag players won’t stay 14 forever.
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“As you get older, you start to become adults, you look for things that are more challenging for you,” Pruett said. At the same time, these players probably won’t abandon VR altogether. “They’ve been playing since they were 12,” he noted.
They are used to a different type of game with a greater emphasis on social interaction, and they are also less prone to motion sickness than older players. “We’ve never had young adults who are VR natives,” Pruett noted. While there’s no hard data yet on what these players might do in the future, he suggested that older players may be drawn to games that retain some of the quirky physical and social elements of games like GorillaTag and UG, but with much more detail.
“I suspect they will remain a core group of gamers,” Pruett said. “But the games they’re playing will change, and the amount of money they have to spend will change as well.” In addition to these older teens, Meta is also betting on consumers in their 30s to discover VR in the coming years. “They watch a lot of movies, they watch a lot of sports, they watch a lot of Netflix,” Pruett said.
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“But they don’t identify as gamers.” Pruett suggested that many of these consumers won’t buy VR headsets for gaming, but as personal TVs and devices for watching 3D content. Meta has been working to appeal to this audience for some time and reportedly has a lightweight headset with an external compute unit in development that is expected to be released in the near future.
