Launch Half-Life: Alyx provoked (in a good way) about 1 million additional monthly connected VR-set for April 2020, a leap which almost tripled the previous largest monthly increase.
Every month, Valve collects information from users of Steam, to determine some basic statistics about the hardware and software used by users of the platform and learn how it changes over time, the use of VR headsets.
Recent survey data Steam is first case when we see the effect of Half-Life: Alyx in numbers; although the game was launched in late March, Valve announced that most survey data are collected at the beginning of each month, so the impact of the launch of the game was not really solved until now.
The data represent the number of VR headsets that are connected to Steam for this month, so for clarity we will call the resulting figure “monthly connected headsets”; it is the closest official rate among “active users of virtual reality” in Steam, although it cannot take into account the headset that were connected during a particular month, but was not used.
Launch Half-Life: Alyx brought the biggest leap in the history of the monthly connected VR headsets on Steam.
Monthly connected VR headset at Steam
The latest data for April shows that during the month of 1.91% of all Steam users connected to your PC with a virtual headset. It is definitely an all-time high and the biggest jump in one month, almost three times the previous record in December and January during the holiday season 2019-2020
For comparison, the Steam from the connected virtual headsets occur approximately twice as often as Linux users, and about twice less than the Mac OS.
Although the data Valve is useful to determine which headset is most popular in Steam, the trend of using headsets with monthly connection has always been confusing, because the data is presented solely in the percentage of Steam users, which in itself is not static and is constantly fluctuating figure.
Based on this model, based on historical data research, along with official data points directly from Valve and Steam, in April, has added about 950 000 connected VR headsets compared to the previous month, in total about 2.7 million sets. This is the largest total number and largest jump in the history data.
To be clear, the increase set for 950 000 is not necessarily a new headset. The difference between the new headsets and those that just previously were not connected during the previous month, unknown.
Of course, it was expected that Half-Life Alyx will lead to a certain jump. The question is: how many of these added monthly set will remain after this jump? Likely to expect the next data point will fall compared to April, but will be interesting to see what part of the jump is to take a more long-term perspective.
The share of different VR headsets in Steam
With regard to the shares set in the Steam, then the largest of which added in a proportion in April became the Oculus Quest. Although this is a standalone headset, with Oculus Link , it can optionally connect to a PC and will work the same as the PC VR headset. It is obvious that Half-Life: Alyx was the main reason why many owners of Quest connected my headset to Steam, which led to the increase in the share of Quest to 6.03% ( + 3,14% ) set in Steam.
Interestingly, the latest Oculus headset for PC, Rift’s, fell to 21.95% ( -5,08% ), which is a significant change that indicates that a large proportion of users of Rift’s already using SteamVR, leaving less room for relative growth compared to the old headsets such as the Rift level 16,60% ( + 1,04% ) and WMR on the level of 8.54% ( + 0,26% ), which is more likely to be pulled out of the wardrobe and used for Half-Life: Alyx.
Speaking of Valve Index, the headset of the company in April made up of 11.94% (+ 1,00% ), which makes Valve the third largest provider of headsets to Steam in less than a year after launch.
However, Oculus and Samsung continue to dominate Steam and Valve and WMR are farther away on the 3rd and 4th place.
As before, it is worth noting that the Steam survey gives us a view of only those headsets, which are connected to Steam. This means that it does not account for some of the users of Rift that do not use Steam and other large headsets like the PlayStation VR and offline Quest.
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