Quest 2 Continues to Grow by Leaps and Bounds Among VR Headsets on Steam
Despite being marketed primarily as a standalone headset, Quest 2 is continuing its meteoric rise among VR headsets used on PC through Steam. Last month the headset picked up another 3.54% of the share of headsets on the platform, rocketing past other headsets in the process, and pushing the share of all Facebook headsets on the platform to nearly 60%.
Each month Valve collects info from Steam users to determine some baseline statistics about what kind of hardware and software is used by the platform’s population, and to see how things are changing over time, including the use of VR headsets.
The data shared in the survey represents the number of headsets connected to Steam over a given month, so we call the resulting figure ‘monthly-connected headsets’ for clarity; it’s the closest official figure there is to ‘monthly active VR users’ on Steam, with the caveat that it only tells us how many VR headsets were connected, not how many were actually used.
While Valve’s data is a useful way see which headsets are most popular on Steam, the trend of monthly-connected headsets is obfuscated because the data is given exclusively as percentages relative to Steam’s population—which itself is an unstated and constantly fluctuating figure.
To demystify the data Road to VR maintains a model, based on the historical survey data along with official data points directly from Valve and Steam, which aims to correct for Steam’s changing population and estimate the actual count—not the percent—of headsets being used on Steam.
Monthly-Connected Headsets
Following three months of continuous growth, and a new record high last month, the number of monthly-connected VR headsets on Steam dropped slightly in April to 2.22% (−0.08%), which we estimate to be about 2.85 million monthly-connected headsets.
Looking at VR adoption on Steam compared to some other metrics gives an idea of how VR stacks up. At 2.22%, VR adoption on Steam is steadily encroaching on the total number of MacOS users using Steam on a monthly basis, while the growth of users with 8+ CPU cores is so far outpacing VR.
Share of VR Headsets on Steam
Looking at the breakdown of individual headsets in use on Steam, we can see that Quest 2 continues to grow in share by leaps and bounds. Last month the headset reached 27.79% (+3.54%) of the share of headsets on Steam, it’s second largest monthly gain on record.
To put this level of growth into perspective, Valve Index, another major headset on the platform, grew in share by only a tiny fraction to 16.39% (+0.02%) compared to Quest 2.
Quest 2’s significant growth in share came at the expense of Facebook and non-Facebook headsets alike: HTC Vive at 11.38% (−0.86%), original Rift at 6.29% (−0.78%), Rift S at 20.25% (−0.71%), Windows Mixed Reality at 5.81% (−0.69%), and a handful of smaller losses from less common headsets.
Quest 2’s growth has also pushed the share of all Facebook headsets on Steam to new heights, reaching nearly 60% of monthly-connected headsets in April.
Meanwhile, the share of all HTC headsets on Steam dropped to 15.50% (−1.01%), making Valve the second largest headset vendor on Steam for the first time, with its single Index headset holding 16.39% (+0.02%) share.
The post Quest 2 Continues to Grow by Leaps and Bounds Among VR Headsets on Steam appeared first on Road to VR.
Filed under: Feature,News,quest 2 growth,quest 2 sales,quest 2 unit sales,steam vr survey,SteamVR,steamvr headsets,steamvr survey,vr headset growth,vr headset sales,vr headset unit sales,vr headset units,VR Industry - @ 4. Mai 2021 0:36