Google-owned XR studio Owlchemy Labs announced that its breakout VR hit Job Simulator (2016) has now surpassed six million installs.
Job Simulator has been one of the most successful VR games over the past decade, having not found firm footing as a launch title for the original HTC Vive, PSVR, and Oculus Touch back in 2016, but also for having pioneered many of the fundamentals VR developers rely on today.
In short, the madcap simulator parody was one of the first to really nail VR object interaction while serving up immersive room-scale gameplay.
And while you’d expect a bulk of those 6 million installs to come from its earliest days as a regular chart topper, it wasn’t until early 2020 that Job Simulator officially went platinum, selling over 1 million copies.
By then, Job Simulator had already found its next wave of success on Quest, later coming to PSVR 2 and Apple Vision Pro in 2023 and 2024 respectively.
Notably, the number of installs probably doesn’t directly reflect units sold—decidedly a more direct measure of its success with consumers—although it may not be that far off.
In 2016, Job Simulator came free with HTC Vive for a limited time, which may count towards installs and not sales as such. It was also included in Meta’s Horizon Plus subscription games service in March 2025, which lets Quest users download select titles and keep them as long as they’re subscribers. That’s another place the studios might feel more confident counting install numbers and not sales.
Another place is VR arcades. In 2024, leading software distributor SpringboardVR said Job Simulator was their top-performing game thanks to its popularity with kids and VR first-timers. And those arcades weren’t buying Job Simulator—SpringboardVR is a games subscription service with an enterprise-focused licensing structure.
In addition to the news, Owlchemy Labs announced its free-to-play multiplayer Quest game Dimensional Double Shift crossed the one million download mark just over a year after its open beta launch, with the studio noting that the Job Sim-style social game recently became its fastest-growing title, with players logging 2.5 million total hours since its open beta launch in September 2024.
