Nearly ten months after the launch of Meta Quest 3, Valve Index is still the second most used SteamVR headset:
Quest 2: 39.66 percent Valve Index: 16.10 percent Quest 3: 15.65 percent Quest 3, released in October 2023, took third place in January 2024 with a 14% share of SteamVR headset usage, but has only grown slightly since then. Six months later, Valve Index is still defending its position. An impressive feat! The headset celebrated its fifth birthday in June and is still sold by Valve (the Valve Index VR kit costs twice as much as Quest 3). No successor has been announced or hinted at by Valve.
In general, not much has happened with the SteamVR stats since we last wrote about them in May. Will the release of the PC adapter for Playstation VR 2 next week bring some change? We are curious to see how Sony’s headset will fare in the SteamVR stats. The same goes for the budget headset Meta Quest 3S, which is expected to be released later this year.
SteamVR users as a percentage of the total Steam user base has dropped from 1.92 to 1.73 percent since April.
Alyx is just a spin-off, no? I think a HL3 would’ve likely had a different impact. But even then, VR was and still is extremely expensive. Both for the devices themselves as well as the needed hardware to run it (at least without eye tracking, which afaik is not a thing in SteamVR yet?).
The backlash of people being annoyed by a new Half-life title being VR only was bad enough for Alyx. Yet making a VR FPS work equally well for non-VR is impossible.
Yeah, but to be fair, Steam itself also caused a huge amount of backlash at the time. And internet was also pricey back then. Not on the same level as VR currently but still. But yes, we need a proper consumer friendly priced VR (that isn’t tied to Facebook). We’re in a bit of an egg vs hen limbo right now since no one wants to make VR games with it being such a small niche market, and no one wants to buy headsets for those prices, especially if there’s no games for it either.