Fun With Numbers

In order to create the ultimate collection of Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Go information the most important data we needed was the software library.

No-where on the internet is there a complete list of released software, so we had to create our own, and it was far from an easy process. It's still possible to access the Gear VR library via the official Oculus (Meta) website, but it only loads 16 titles at a time. It also only shows titles that are still available, which means we had to dig through our own account's Library list and various other methods to dig out the Delisted titles. Delisted titles still have a page on the Oculus website, but it won't come up using the in built search function. We had to manually use Google to find the direct URLs.

Update 2024: The Gear VR store officially closed in May.

9 days, and over 30 hours later, the "Master List" was complete. Now let's have a closer look of what's inside the Gear VR / Go software library.

According to our extensive research there were 1312 applications released for the Gear VR and Oculus Go between the release of the original Gear VR Innovator Edition for Note 4 in December of 2014 and September 15, 2020 when Oculus stopped approving new applications for listing in their online store. Averaged out, that works out to:

• 262.4 titles per year

• 18.87 titles per month

• One new release every 1.613 days

Compared to many of the popular home video game consoles, that's quite a respectable software library!

Update 17/10/2023: We found a few more. Total library is 1361 titles

Hardware Compatibility

Of these 1312 titles, 1076 have complete compatibility with both the Samsung Gear VR and the Oculus Go (released May 1, 2018).

124 titles were released for Gear VR and never submitted for Oculus Go compatibility

In it's just over 2 year life span, the Oculus Go received 112 exclusive releases.

A Focus on 360 Video

Immersive video, spherical video, or 360 video had been around since 2012 when first presented to the world at the IVRPA conference using a camera rig created by Joergen Geerds.

The Gear VR became the perfect platform for watching this sort of content and 360 video content quickly became a major part of the platform's software library. How big?

There are 34 Gear VR only apps, 171 Gear / Go compatible apps and 20 exclusive Oculus Go apps focused on 360 video content. That's just over 17% off all apps!

App Pricing

Although millions of Gear VR units shipped during it's life time, software sales were never particularly strong. The following is a quote from John Carmack:

“It was the classic leaky bucket that growth companies are advised not to pour effort into,” Carmack lamented. “We did pour a lot of money into the content there. There was significant amounts of money spent on content, and when I would look at a spreadsheet on where all of it went, and some of the apps that did almost nothing, it’s kind of sad.”

It's almost exactly a 50% split between free apps and paid apps. 529 free, 534 paid.

Geek Facts: The mean price is $6.87. Median is $5.99. Mode is $7.99.

An Experimental Platform

As the first widely available consumer virtual reality platform, the Gear VR was very much a platform where developers could experiment to find out what worked and what didn't.

This is very much reflected in the number of titles made by developers.

• 732 developers (79%) only released just one title

• 115 developers (12.4%) released two

• 39 developers (4.2%) released three

• 19 developers (2%) released four

• 10 developers (1.1%) released five

• 4 developers (0.43%) released six

• 5 developers (0.54%) released seven

• 3 developers (0.32%) released eight

• Felix and Paul Studios released 12 immersive video focused applications

• Oculus Studios developed 13 titles in-house

Check Your Connection

The first web browser was created in 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and the "modern" internet has been a part of most people's lives since the late 1990's.

Of the 1312 Gear VR and Oculus Go applications:

• 888 apps don't require an internet connection

• 250 apps do need an internet connection

• 168 apps require internet to download additional content

Geek Facts - File sizes: The smallest app is Chemistry VR at 100.1Mb. The biggest is Explore Georgia at 6.7Gb

Gamepad Support

One of the best ways to enjoy the 3 degrees of freedom style virtual reality games is using a traditional console gamepad. So much so we wrote a whole article about it.

The vast majority of titles support using the gamepad as a simple replacement for clicking on the built-in trackpad, but how many titles actually have proper gamepad support?

• 286 (30.9%) titles are listed as having gamepad support

• 1026 (69.1%) titles are listed without gamepad support