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.
I really just don't think the consumer desire is there at this point, and I don't think there's much to be done to counter that. Valve released a new Half Life game and still couldn't achieve critical mass. Look at all the billions Meta has poured into Quest and it's still mostly a Christmas present given by confused grandparents that gets used a few times a year.
In scripted demos and edited YouTube clips, they look like a blast, but the reality is just way too much work for too little reward for most people.
Anecdotally, I've owned a couple headsets over the past decade, buying all of them were impulse decisions that I regretted; I currently have my complete Index for sale for $400 on FBMP just hoping someone takes it off my hands at this point
I think there's enough desire, but the threshold is still too high. I have an Index, that I love, and I haven't used the thing in almost 2 years now because it's such a drag to set it up. Also, pretty much all games are standing up and most of the time when I want to play I want to sit down (racing/rally sims ftw) and I know I'm not alone. And taking the headset on and off can be a drag. You need to be able to quickly and effortlessly jump in and out, both physically and digitally. But things are moving in the right direction when it comes to all those things.
But then there's still also the catch 22 of content. AAA games is what could sell the platform, but very few devs want to spend an absolute shitload of money on something with such great uncertainty, financially. And the uncertainty has only gotten bigger the past couple of years.
I got an Index set last year and still use it several times a week.
Check out the Luke Ross VR mod - you can play a lot of current AAA games in VR with it. I'm enjoying the hell out of Elden Ring's DLC in VR.
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.