Image: Valve
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Meta Quest 2’s SteamVR market share fell sharply in September after Valve said it corrected the stats in August.
Valve’s monthly hardware and software survey tracks all VR headsets that have been connected to PCs with Steam installed at least once during the month in question and whose users participate in the survey. Among other things, the statistics show the percentage of SteamVR users in the total Steam user base.
The highest value recorded to date is 2.31% (May 2021). In September 2022, the percentage was 2.03 percent. Assuming Steam averaged 132 million monthly active users last year, SteamVR should have around 2.7 million users.
The fact that the percentage remains the same or even decreases over months and years suggests that SteamVR’s user base is growing more slowly than the rest of Steam’s user base.
Recently, Valve’s survey has produced a lot of dubious numbers. Valve then spoke up and admitted there were issues with data collection and analysis. The company corrected the August survey results and said it expects more accurate results in the future. Therefore, the percentage above is probably correct.
Meta Quest 2 suffers heavy losses
The following statistics show the market shares of VR headsets recorded by Steam in August and September 2022. Devices that have less than one percent market share are not listed (exception: Pico Neo 3).
VR users exclusively on Meta and Viveport platforms who have not installed Steam or participated in Steam data collection are not captured by statistics, nor are PSVR players and Meta Quest 1 & 2 users who do not. only use their VR headset independently. As a result, SteamVR stats only reflect a small portion of the entire VR market.
| August 2022 | September 2022 | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Quest 2 | 49.25% | 41.39% | – 7.86% |
| valve index | 15.44% | 17.21% | + 1.77% |
| Oculus Rift S | 11.05% | 13.94% | +2.88% |
| HTC Vive | 6.51% | 7.07% | +0.56% |
| Oculus Rift | 3.99% | 6.41% | + 2.42% |
| Windows Mixed Reality | 4.40% | 5.11% | +0.71% |
| Meta Quest | 3.17% | 2.58% | – 0.59% |
| HTC Vive Pro | 1.45% | 1.49% | +0.04% |
| HTC Vive Cosmos | 1.33% | 1.20% | – 0.13% |
| Pico Neo 3 | 0.84% | 0.83% | – 0.01% |
| SteamVR Userbase | 2.05% | 2.03% | – 0.02% |
Meta Quest 2 lost almost 8% of SteamVR’s market share in September, while older PC VR devices Oculus Rift (2016), HTC Vive (2016) and Oculus Rift S (2019) gained more ground than Valve Index in some cases. This bucks the trend of the past two years and once again casts doubt on Valve’s numbers. I can’t think of a good reason for such a development.
Meta Quest 2 may still grow a little less this year than it did in the 2020 and 2021 Christmas seasons, however, partly because of price increases and partly because of Meta Quest’s first real competitor, Pico 4, which will be released in october.
PC VR usage: Seasonal decline
The frequency and intensity of use of SteamVR headsets cannot be gathered from the monthly Steam survey. The following statistic, which shows the monthly average of maximum concurrent SteamVR users, gives a rough idea.
This number reached a new high of 24,000 in January 2022, which fell again in the following months and stood at around 16,000 in August and September – a seasonal drop that can be seen every year. A slight increase is again expected for the end of the year.
The PC VR market has generally been slow to grow in recent years: possible reasons include a lack of great PC VR games, high graphics card prices, or simply low interest from PC gamers.
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