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.
Nice to see. And at the same time sad to see such little action in the VR space. I really thought things were going to take off after Alyx. I’m just hoping Valve will keep Steam VR and keep improving it, so that is even better when the next XR wave happens.
What I don’t get is why 3rd party studios don’t use the Source engine more. Alyx
and Boneworksetc show that it is by far the best engine for VR fps.But we rather get janky Unity3D games that mostly suck.
The only real reason that I can think of is studios wanting to make cross platform games that work natively on the Quest as well, but there is literally no good VR fps that pulled off that feat. without compromising so much that the result didn’t suck on both platforms.
Alyx and Boneworks etc show that it is by far the best engine for VR fps.
Boneworks uses Unity.
Hmm, interesting. So Unity can be made to be non janky in VR. Thanks for the correction.
I’m not convinced that the engine is going to solve that problem. Janky programmers will make janky games no matter the engine. And how many VR Games have been made on Source? 1? Not exactly a good set of examples for them to work from there.
They can just use the code from Alyx and replace the assets: Instant good VR fps. This constant reinventing the wheel for stuff that’s available and well proven is the problem.
I don’t know. Could it be a licencing issue? Cost? Or just that they would have to learn a new engine just for a VR game that isn’t as versatile as Unity? I don’t know.
As a programmer (though not in the games industry) I can inform you that the vast majority of sw companies operate by the “the fastest solution is the best solution” principle. If they have developers who already know Unity it’s a pretty big expense to have everybody learn a new game engine, and the management would need to be convinced that using Source is going to lead to a corresponding increase in sold copies of their games.
That’s one of the whole issues with VR adoption. Valve didn’t release a VR engine! I wish they released a VR engine and Alyx was only a simple tech demo. They inverted what was needed and adoption of VR has suffered.
I currently have a quest pro but I am so ready to upgrade to a steam only oled headset. The beyond sucked and everything else is just too damn expensive. Someone please bring out an affordable pancake lens oled headset that has great lenses and small form.
VR seems a bit weird right now. There’s been a lot of tech development of things like the lenses but I think only small scaled production headsets with accordingly high prices use all the new stuff. And the Deckard will likely be something very enthusiast level / expensive too.
Also, do we know by now if the lacking features of the PSVR 2 adapter come down to the device itself or Steam VR simply not supporting them yet? I doubt we’ll see a lot of sales with the lack of those features on the PC.
And the Deckard will likely be something very enthusiast level / expensive too.
Let’s see. There are some indications that at least one possible idea of the Deckard is modular, i.e. using an older Quest2 level Qualcomm chipset to do all the inside out tracking, eye-tracking and optics etc., and having a SteamDeck like x86 companion cube (possibly belt mounted, but likely wireless) for running the actual games. Such a setup would also allow for a cheaper display only option that would connect to a normal PC, but still allow basic use as a VR movie player or such in full standalone mode.
And they could also sell the companion cube as a standalone Steam-machine like home console for connecting to a regular TV.
P.S.: yes I would love for the official name to be “Companion Cube” in reference to Portal 😊
Is the Deckard confirmed to still be in development?
It never was confirmed to be in development.
Ah ok, I figured since you said it “will be” that I had just missed the confirmation.
I’m not linking my Facebook account to my gaming.
Fuck that noise.
Quest is an economy headset and Index is a premium one. Different markets. The ancient rift s still has a huge number of owners because there is no economy headset as good as it, including all the Quests. If Meta made a headset with a display port instead of streaming blurry video to each eye over wifi, they’d get a lot bigger market share. But they only care about their standalone users, PC is secondary at best.
It’s not like I’m going to trade my depreciated yet top-tier headset for som ZB economy headset.
Index was fantastic so I’m not hugely surprised.
Honestly the Quest 2 was a great piece of kit when paired with a gaming PC. It would take a lot to make me upgrade.
Sucks I got my quest 1 before meta bought them up. Now it collects dust with barely 100hrs of use. Could use that $500 right about now.
