Steam: More VR Headsets Out There, But The Install Base Is Still Small

General news News PC PC News 05/04/2020

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We see more exact figures about how Valve’s new VR-exclusive title, Half-Life: Alyx, has increased the number of virtual reality headsets in the homes of players on Steam.

Steam has a hardware survey that collects your computer’s data in one or two clicks. Thus, Gabe Newell’s company can see how many cores your CPU has (or who manufactured it), what GPU you have, which Windows OS you use, or how much RAM is installed, or if you have a VR headset or not. The survey says that in one month, the VR install base has increased by 950 thousand users.

Road to VR says that in April, about 2.7 million VR headsets were in the possession of the PC players, but this figure doesn’t say much on its own, so let’s put it clearly: about 1.91% of the Steam users own a VR headset at the moment. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they actively use them as well, just the fact that they are connected to their PC when they logged onto Steam. Still, it shows how much Half-Life: Alyx has helped to spread virtual reality. The HTC Vive is still leading the market, followed by the Oculus Rift, but the Valve Index is catching up…

A few more interesting tidbits: Linux isn’t commonly used on Steam – only 0.89% of the surveyed machines ran this operating system branch, and only 7.2% of the PCs had more than eight cores. Last year, AMD’s CPUs have increased their market share, which was because the Ryzen products allow a bang for the buck value for gaming.

So Half-Life: Alyx did boost the VR market, but it’s still far from becoming mainstream. (Even the PlayStation VR isn’t in that situation, especially if we compare its sales to the PlayStation 4’s.) The ~2% ratio is fine, but it’s still a niche percentage. VR, just like game streaming (Google Stadia, Microsoft xCloud, PlayStation Now, etc…), need time to spread further. (And we don’t know how much the standalone Oculus Quest could increase these figures…)

Source: PCGamer

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Angyal Anikó

Anikó, our news editor and communication manager, is more interested in the business side of the gaming industry. She worked at banks, and she has a vast knowledge of business life. Still, she likes puzzle and story-oriented games, like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, which is her favourite title. She also played The Sims 3, but after accidentally killing a whole sim family, swore not to play it again. (For our office address, email and phone number check out our IMPRESSUM)