Welcome to Lowpass, a newsletter about the future of entertainment and the next big hardware platforms, including smart TVs, ambient computing and AR / VR. This week: Immersive tech VC Tipatat Chennavasin shares his insights into the VR market, and Sonos is launching a new service for businesses.

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Beat this: Last week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the VR rhythm game Beat Saber generated $255 million in sales between its initial release in May of 2019 and last October. The revelation was no surprise to Tipatat Chennavasin, whose Venture Reality Fund was an early investor in Beat Saber maker Beat Games.

Chennavasin’s investments in the VR space are informed by a lot of number crunching: He regularly scours VR app stores to count the number of reviews for listed titles, and then combines those numbers with other publicly available stats as well as internal performance data VR developers have shared with him to estimate sales figures — an approach that’s very similar to the way mobile app intelligence companies like Sensor Tower and Data.ai work.

Following the Beat Saber news, I caught up with Chennavasin this week; here are some of his latest insights:

VR developers have sold $3 billion worth of apps and games since 2016, the year Meta released the first consumer version of the Oculus Rift, Chennavasin estimates. Sales have been picking up significantly ever since Meta released its Quest headset; last year, Quest sales accounted for 73% of the entire VR apps market. “It's not a $100 billion sector yet,” he said. “But the fact that so many developers are making real money now is fascinating to me. 40 titles have done over $10 million in revenue, that's huge for the Quest.”