Since the launch of Quest 2 the headset has steadily taken over as the leading PC VR device used on SteamVR, now accounting for about one-third of all headsets being used on the platform. After a month long sales pause due to a facepad recall, the headset sees its first ever month without growth in share on the platform, but it’s likely to pick up the pace again soon.

It took only a few months for Quest 2 to become the most popular headset used on Steam. As of the latest data provided by Valve, it now accounts for 32.15% of headsets used on Steam. But that’s actually down slightly (−0.41%), for the first time after six months of major growth.

The reason for the stalled growth seems clear. In late July Facebook announced that it was putting a pause on retail sales of Quest 2 while it dealt with a recall of the headset’s facepad. The headset was essentially out of stock for an entire month, which appears to have contributed to it seeing a loss of share on Steam for the first time since its launch.

With both the Quest 2 128GB and 256GB models now back in stock at major retailers like Amazon, we expect to see the headset’s growth on Steam continue in the months ahead.

Monthly-connected VR Headsets on Steam

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.

Overall, the count of headsets on Steam appeared to drop significantly in the latest data, from 2.07% of users in July to 1.74% of users in August. But the drop is likely overstated; like we saw last month when the count bounced back after a drop, there was once again a large influx of Chinese (+7.21%) and Korean (+1.25%) users on Steam which appears to be driving down the reported portion of VR users overall. Those regions are thought to be significantly less likely to own PC VR headsets compared to Western regions, especially as Oculus, the leading vendor of PC VR headsets, doesn’t sell to those countries.

With the added variable of a surge of Chinese and Korean Steam users (which was even larger than the prior month where a large drop in VR users was reported in the data), it’s difficult to say how accurate the latest count of VR users on Steam is, though the trend will ultimately reveal itself over time.

Share of VR Headsets on Steam

Aside from Quest 2’s stunted growth due to its retail pause, there wasn’t much movement among the share of individual headsets on Steam. Quest 2 remains far and away the leading headset used now at 32.15% (–0.41%), with Rift S continuing to hold a distant second place at 18.09% (+0.30%). Interestingly, the original Quest saw the largest growth last month (even though it wasn’t much) now at 5.70% (+0.37%).

Valve’s Index headset dropped slightly to 15.99% (–0.24%), but still easily holds its place as the third most used headset on the platform, ahead of the original HTC Vive, which continues it’s slow decline, now at 10.01% (–0.36%).

As for the share of headset vendors overall, Facebook continues to dominate, despite dropping slightly to 61.13% (–0.14%). HTC’s grasp also declined slightly to 14.45% (–0.11%), while Valve dropped a bit more to 15.99% (–0.24%).

As for where those losses went from the leading vendors; largely to Windows VR headsets which reached 5.79% (+0.22%), marking a rare two month growth-streak for the headsets.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • nullcodes

    VR has been advancing at a snail’s incremental advancing pace. It reminds me of smartphones in the early 2000s until the iPhone came along. Now we have to wait for a hopefully similar jolt that will happen when Apple releases its 8k-per-eye headsets.

    • S Ander

      Rumours say that Apple is going to release vr headset which is much more powerful and advanced than Quest 2 BUT it will be priced 2000 dollars and it cannot be connected to pc for pcvr games!

      Maybe Valve will release stand alone hybrid headset with powerful Amd apu with consumer prices.

      I have Quest 2 and powerful pc and i think what we need is true competition(like Valve standalone hybrid headset) and content.

      When Sony is going to release psvr2 i think many games from that platform is going to ported to pc(and even Quest 2).

      I am mostly happy with my Quest 2 and instead of waiting for better headset to buy i am waiting for great new games.

      • The latest AppleVR rumor *I* heard ….
        COST: $999
        CATEGORY: All-In-Two [connectivity to iDevice necessary]

        ☹️

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Rumours say that Apple is going to release vr headset which is much more powerful and advanced than Quest 2 BUT it will be priced 2000 dollars and it cannot be connected to pc for pcvr games!

        The actual rumors say that the Apple XR HMD will only have a minimal SoC onboard that is mostly optimized for streaming and delegate the actual rendering on a more powerful external device like an iPhone 12/13 or an iMac “within wireless range”. So it would connect to an iOS/macOS device in a similar way as PCVR users connect a Quest 2 for streaming today.

        There is of course no guarantee that Apple would allow a PC to stream to their XR HMD, but Apple actually cooperated with HTC and Valve in 2017 and made SteamVR with the Vive available on MacOS. It was mostly targeted at content developers, very buggy and almost nobody ever used it, so it was dropped a couple of macOS iterations before, but obviously Apple was willing/interested in giving/getting access to Steam. And as they estimate sales below 200K units per year for their first XR device, this again is a developer device. They probably don’t assume developers will rush to port their OpenXR/Quest 2/PCVR games to a device expected to be easily outsold by the Pico Neo 3, so allowing users to connect to play PCVR games will not be any competition.

        So we may end up with a rather expensive device targeted at developers and requiring another rather expensive device to run anything interesting, but which might also be allowed to connect wirelessly to a PC to play games via SteamVR. Not to piss off Facebook, but to give developers a tool to experiment with hardware much faster than any Mac today, as preparation for whatever they have in the pipeline for 2025 or 2030, and have a rather small, but rich subset of users buying it and a matching RTX 3090 just because the can.

        • Putting out a devkit for something that’s a DECADE away …?? lol
          Preposterous.

    • Mary Scott

      I’m creating 85 US bucks/h to do some small tasks off a home computer…~av315~I have certainly not realized like it can even possible but one of my top buddy was making $27k just in four weeks easily doing this simple opportunity also she had satisfied me to avail…~av315~Explore fresh instructions on visiting following web-link >>> https://bit.ly/special601?/av315

    • Geogaddi

      Jolt? More like a barely noticeable tickle at that price point.

      I would put more hope into Sony delivering with the PSVR2 and hybrid VR games. If that gains traction it should gain PCVR as well – why not make a PC version of the same game?

      • kontis

        PSVR is a joke. VR is not just gaming platform and even for gaming it needs a much more open platform for experimentation.

        All the VR “killers”, the most popular things VR ever had to offer are not and never will be on PSVR: VRChat and modded Beat Saber.

        And the idea of Metaverse is literally illegal on Playstation and sony will never allow it, shooting themselves in the foot in the process. Tim Sweeney will of course conveniently ignore this issue, because consoles are special or something, haha.

        So saying that PSVR is the future of VR is laughable. Sony can make their archaic moated little game boxes, but they wont be influential in the future. Their influence already waned in the last decade.

        • Geogaddi

          Ugh, spare me your boring fanboy speeches, or better yet: just get a room with that weirdo CaryMGVR.

          I want VR to succeed as a whole and PSVR2 will clearly be an important part of that. Nuff said!

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        One of the problems with the idea of PSVR2 pushing PCVR with ports is the minimal spec required. The PS5 is technically a PC with an eight core CPU, a GPU about as fast as an RTX 2070 Super, 16GB of shared GDDR6 memory, and a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD that can read 5.5GB/sec.

        All these parts are important, as this is what allows to create games without any load times, as e.g. insane amount of textures can be loaded into the GPU address space while you are turning your head, meaning the effective graphics storage for any scene is, in theory, only limited by the size of the SSD. If PS5 and PSVR2 game developers utilize these features, it could be very hard to impossible to port these titles to PCs. You’d actually need a faster machine, as Windows games do not benefit from the vertical integration and optimization of the PS5, with a PCIe 4 bus, excluding all Intel CPUs before Spring 2021, obviously running Window 11 for the direct storage access (or Win 10 once this has been backported), and you may still run into bandwidth issues due to the PC using DDR4 and only having limited amount of GDDR6 on your GPU.

        It is unlikely that all games will immediately fully utilize all the special features, but one of the benefits of console development is that over time, developers learn to optimize a lot and it actually pays of thanks to the stable hardware. The big danger is that PSVR2 developers might decide that a too small percentage of the already small PCVR market has machines fast enough to justify trying to port in the first place, or design in a way that could make a port feasible.

        • Cl

          Good thing pc hardware advances faster than consoles get updated.

      • ViRGiN

        Why make pcvr version if ps5 version, developed for one headset and one console sold so well?

        Holy fuck pcvr people, wake up. You aren’t buying anything, always waiting for sales, and no matter how many games releases over the years, collectively, everyone is playing beat saber, rec room and pavlov.

        PCVR is becoming a machine to develop for mobile VR and PSVR2. Native PCVR is a joke, and you would all love to blame Facebook for that, but it’s actually 100% valve fault who does nothing for VR other than allowing thousands of shovelware on their store.

    • kontis

      Apple is not going the nerdy box on your face route. We already had sources talking about the whole powerful VR project being canceled at Apple and they went straight to AR.

      They are a LIFESTYLE company and there is no lifestyle in VR no-life entertainment.

      Look at the people spending hundreds of hours in VR each month. Majority of them are weebs, trans, furrries and other people with troubles who try to escape reality. Surprise, surprise, VR is the best escapists tool. Who would have thought?!

      But for megacoprs like Apple these are not attractive consumers. The corps don’t want to embrace this power of VR that helps these people. They want billions of normies.

      This is why Facebook talked about Smartglasses day 1 (Since 2014) and it’s the ONLY reason they acquired Oculus. Yes, Facebook is not interested in VR or gaming (lol), believe it or not. It’s nothing more than an intermediary step for them and a little “subgenre”, but not the goal on it sown.

      The only true VR corporation is Valve. But they don’t fully focus on it and don’t have the same resources.

      • care package

        “look at the people spending hundreds of hours in VR each month”..how do I do that?

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          I was first going to suggest a mirror, but after a quick calculation I realized that you’d need to spend at least 6h 40m in VR every single day to qualify, so I have to suggest the Hubble telescope as an alternative.

          • Forget Hubblescope.
            Go with Webbscope.
            If it EVER gets launched …. lol

      • nullcodes

        Nobody is saying the VR project is canceled.

      • lol You couldn’t be more wrong.
        Look to WWDC22, my doubting friend ….

      • Ad

        There’s an impossible force, apple’s desire for glasses and their money; and an immovable object, the impossibility of good glasses based AR. What will give first?

      • JakeDunnegan

        “Facebook is not interested in VR…(lol), believe it or not.”

        Uh, what?

        https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/28/zuckerberg-is-turning-trillion-dollar-facebook-into-a-metaverse-company-he-tells-investors

        Following the quarterly release of Facebook’s earnings numbers where the company’s CFO takes time to walk through the nitty gritty of the company’s financials, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a moment to zoom out and wax on the company’s future goals, specifically calling out his ambitions to turn Facebook into “a metaverse company.”

        “I wanted to discuss this now so that you can see the future that we’re working towards and how our major initiatives across the company are going to map to that,” Zuckerberg said on the call. “What is the metaverse? It’s a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces. You can kind of think of this as an embodied internet that you’re inside of rather than just looking at.

        Emph. mine.

        Note, I’m not rooting for Zuck’s version of the Internet or even VR. But, you are wrong in saying that Valve is the only VR company. I’d argue that Facebook is MORE focused on VR than Valve is. They have more reason to be. Valve has a wildly profitable business model that isn’t dependent on the ephemeral value of “advertising”. FB from a stock price stand point, needs something tangible.

      • Anonymous

        Here we go again… Kontis the troll fanboy who would do all he can to dis Oculus just because it’s FB. Regardless of the announcements or even facts.
        Grow up.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Apple’s not gonna move VR for the masses forward as it already seems that it’s locked to Apple hardware.. no thank you..

      • morfaine

        Apple has a significant portion of the smartphone market and that’s a closed ecosystem. I wouldn’t count them out. Price and features are what will make or break AppleVR.

        Their smartwatches were their last big new product category and while they aren’t massively popular that segment is still going well for them.

  • The problem of this influx of Chinese and Korean Steam users is that they are invalidating all the stats about SteamVR headsets we are considering

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Still no. I did the math for that in June, when the numbers first dropped. To explain the relative drop in VR users with an increase in non VR users, the total number of Steam users would have had to increase by 24% worldwide within a single month.

      In 2018 Chinese and Korean users made up just below 14% of all Steam users. Even if their share had increased by 50% since then to a total of ~20% in 2021, a “large influx of Chinese (+7.21%) and Korean (+1.25%) users” only boils down to a worldwide increase of 1.7%. Compared to the 24% increase needed, we are still missing 93% of the explanation for the drop in VR users.

      I’m sure you can find other factors and slightly different results if you had all the most current stats, but it is too easy to simply say “Of course, more Chinese/Korean users, that must be it, VR is still fine, no need to worry.” When arguing with numbers, you have to verify your results by actually running the numbers once in a while.

      • Blaexe

        I’ll run the numbers then.

        Let’s assume there were 130m active monthly Steam numbers in July. The English language accounted for 37.96% of that. That’d make 49.4m users. 1.97% of these 130m were VR users – that makes 2.56m.

        Now let’s just assume the number of english speaking users (49.4m) kept steady in August. That’d mean the overall numbers would have to rise to 147m monthly active users. (as now there’s a 33.56% share of english language representing 49.4m users)

        And let’s also assume that the number of VR users (2.56m) was actually the same in August.

        2.56m VR users out of 147m Steam users makes…1.74% (coincidentally the exact percentage of VR users in the August survey).

        Also the chinese users alone – going from 22.91% to 30.12% – would account for 14.5m of the 17m additional users.

        I think you have a fundamental flaw in your numbers. You seem to assume the +7.21% of users is relative to the Chinese users only. But it’s relative to all Steam users.

        My numbers clearly still are an oversimplification but they show that such a massive shift in user numbers can explain all the perceived shift in VR users.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          I think you have a fundamental flaw in your numbers.

          Just for starters: you and I are German, so it is kind of strange that you begin by reducing to only those 37.96% counted under “English”. And after removing more than 60% of the world, you actually end up with a number of English speaking users that is larger than the estimated total number of connected HMDs worldwide as indicated in first graph in the article.

          • Blaexe

            The shift in english language almost completely accounts for the shift in chinese language. Nothing strange about that and I explained it.

            Also have no idea what being german has to do with it.

            It was an (again: I literally said that) oversimplification but it should make it clear that your numbers are totally off.

        • wheeler

          This comment needs to be at the top. I obtained similar results in other scenarios where there was a large influx of chinese users. The next thing to do would be to look back through Steam’s hardware survey history and find similar situations where there were large influxes of chinese users.

          It is an oversimplification, but it’s way better than simply saying “no AAA games,” or “it’s because apple hasn’t entered the market,” or “pcvr dead”. Perhaps this is the kind of analysis Roadtovr could perform.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            The math is really simple:

            In July, 2.07% of all Steam users were using VR. In August the number dropped to 1.74%. Divide 1.74 by 2.07, and you get a factor of about 0.84 of monthly change. If you assume that the absolute number of VR users didn’t shrink, then to compensate the absolute number of Steam users must have grown by the inverse of that factor, which is about 1.19, meaning an increase of 19%.

            So if the total number of Steam users grew by 19% worldwide from July to August, while the absolute number of VR users remained the same, then the 1.74% in August would represent the same total number of users as the 2.07% in July. This calculation is completely independent of language or what the actual number of Steam users currently is.

            So unless you find a way to show that an increase of +7.21% of Chinese and +1.25% of Korean players somehow adds up to 19% more Steam players worldwide, your argument has a huge hole in it.

      • Ad

        30% of steam is now chinese language users, so I’m not sure what you mean, and that’s just people playing with the chinese language, more will be playing in english.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          Then I will have to correct myself:

          Even if their share had increased by 100% since then to a total of ~30% in 2021, a “large influx of Chinese (+7.21%) and Korean (+1.25%) users” only boils down to a worldwide increase of 2.54%. Compared to the 24% increase needed, we are still missing 89% of the explanation for the drop in VR users.

          This assumes that the same percentage of Chinese/Korean users use Steam in their native language as in the previous months.

          • Blaexe

            > only boils down to a worldwide increase of 2.54%.

            That’s your flaw right there, as I explained in my comment earlier. Use real numbers instead of percentages, that makes it easier.

          • Ad

            Then you still don’t seem to get it. 30% of steam’s entire user base is speaking chinese, only a little less than english.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            See my comment about the simple math. The squabbling about how many Steam users are from China somewhat misses the point. My answer to your correction about there being 30% Chinese speaking users was simply plugging that number into what I have written before, which was referring to June numbers and rough estimates.

            The important part was the we are still missing 89% of the explanation for the drop in VR users. Again, the 89% is not a precise number. But following the simple math from my comment above/below, the whole theory that the drop in VR user numbers is due to an increase in (Chinese/Korean) users requires a monthly global increases of 19% of Steam users from July to August. There can be plenty of argument about other oversimplifications or assumptions I have made, how many English users are actually count as Chinese, but even if all these can be answered, it would only change the relative impact the new users had.

            The required increase of 19% is derived from the most simple number, the drop of VR users from 2.07% to 1.74%. 19% growth worldwide is a lot more than +7.21 Chinese and +1.25% Korean players. So it is a little moot discussing the exact shares if the whole thesis that the drop is caused by increases in Asia simply doesn’t add up. Steam didn’t grow by 19% last month, so no matter how many Chinese, Irish or Brazilian users were added, there is still a huge drop in absolute VR user numbers that needs to be explained.

            I’m not trying to come up with a specific number, I’m just saying that it is pretty much impossible that the increase in non VR users could have caused a drop even half that size, so we should probably look for other reasons too. Alternatively point out the error in the very, very simple math this is based on.

          • guest

            Did you know Chinese are required to learn basic English to graduate from high school?

    • Look for these numbers to be even more skewed,
      as the CCP only allows videogame playing on the weekend. lol

      • Cless

        Yeah, you are 100% right, ridiculous.
        It is only for minors though.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    This is like the science of wishful thinking. When we saw the huge drop two months ago, the consensus seemed to be that it must be due to heat, even though we never saw a significant summer drop in the years before. When the numbers didn’t bounce back, it became the increase of Chinese users, even though their impact on worldwide Steam user numbers was way too small to explain the drops in VR usage we saw. Now that we see something that looks like a downward trend line (it is way too early to derive that with just four months of data), it must be a short time effect due to the Quest 2 not being sold for a month.

    RoadToVR has a monthly article about the “Top 20 Best Oculus Quest 2 Games & Apps”, the latest update of which was published three weeks ago. These articles collect a number of data from the Oculus Store, so they track Quest 2 development somewhat directly, not as a percentage of Steam users. One of the numbers tracked is how many new ratings the top 20 apps collect, as an indicator how many games/apps /Quest 2 were sold. It’s a little bit more complicated, but this was the gist of my meta analysis comment comparing the development since the Quest 2 release:

    Monthly change in median new ratings for the top 20 payed apps:
    2020-11: + 93
    2020-12: + 307
    2021-01: + 480
    2021-02: + 385
    2021-03: – 25
    2021-04: – 82
    2021-05: + 50
    2021-06: + 39
    2021-07: + 29
    2021-08: – 118

    […]

    So this looks like an initial rush to buy games after the Quest 2 release and the following holiday season, and then a rather sharp cooldown. […] This indicates not only that the Quest sales numbers fell significantly afterwards, but also that most people either only play a few games all the time, or, more likely, largely stop playing in VR. This means user retention on Quest is still very bad, and future software releases cannot necessarily count on sales to users that bought their Quest half a year ago. […]

    This is a second set of data, independent from weather and with no Chinese users at all, showing similar usage drops before the interruption of Quest 2 availability. As with all relative data, there are caveats, I tried to cover some in the original post, including the connection between Quest 2 hardware and software sales. But from both the Steam and Oculus Store numbers it simply doesn’t look like just a short interruption of a long term upwards trend.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Link to original article/comment in separate post to avoid getting stuck in the eternal Disqus “Pending” loop.

      https://www.roadtovr.com/best-oculus-quest-games-app-rated-august-2021/2/#comment-5499074041

      • wheeler

        Sounds it’s time for another injection of stimulus, hype and carefully massaged platform/industry stats

        • guest

          So true. These people are such suckers for FB data centers generating fake users to pump their numbers. Something they are not sustaining the ability to do forever!

    • Ad

      Are you saying this applies to all VR? Then maybe. If it’s just steam, then maybe as well and it’s because of slowing software releases and how dogshit steam is at promoting older software that’s quality.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Basically yes, but it depends on what you mean by all VR. This is a complex subject, so there will be numerous reasons. The dropping Quest 2 sales are partly due to a lot of the enthusiasts buying shortly after release, also indicted by the Steam increase of Quest 2 being closely matched by a drop in Rift and Quest 1 users. So the first mover market is now kind of saturated, and new sales must come from users new to VR, and Facebook will focus most of their marketing around the holiday season, so the Quest 2 simply somewhat slipped off the radar for most people. We will most likely see the next huge and expensive marketing push with the release of RE4.

        We have seen a large influx of new Quest 2 users on Steam, with some users sticking to their older Oculus HMDs. The Oculus Store numbers indicate that most Quest 2 users lose interest after a few months, so it is possible that the Quest 2 numbers on Steam will start to drop, while the VR holdouts with their Rift and Quest 1 have already shown that they will stick around for a longer time.

        PCVR is plagued by a lack of high quality releases. And while almost half of all Steam users now use VR bare bone capable GTX 1060 or better, there is still a huge number of people that currently cannot upgrade for a better VR experience due to the again increasing GPU prices. We are also probably at the end of a VR generation, with everybody waiting for innovations like eye tracking, and a year away from PSVR2 launch titles. Valve itself is currently busy with launching the Steam Deck, so there will be no big push from them either.

        Pretty much the only part of VR that is currently doing well is the industrial part with VR seeing a lot more use for training or visualization. These areas are a lot more profitable than VR game development, but the total number of users is minuscule.

        In the end I couldn’t say what all the factors are, but it is possible to show that it is not simply a glitch that will be forgotten in a few months. I am actually very confident that VR usage will become a lot more widespread and relevant, but it will probably take years to get out of the niche. The current generation of HMDs is much better than what we had before, but still extremely primitive and uncomfortable. And it will take more than five years to squeeze a headset into a pair of sun glasses that a non-enthusiast would be willing to wear for an extended amount of time. This could of course all change with a cheap and superior AIO from Apple, Valve or Facebook, but my guess is that we will see more evolution, not life changing revolution.

        TL;DR: I don’t know what is happening, but whatever the reason is, it is neither a single cause no a short term artifact.

        • Ad

          I personally hope the quest fails, facebook trips, and so many players catch up to a potentially smaller market that a lot of the biggest dangers of VR monopolization can be avoided.

          • ViRGiN

            I personally hope you get an incurable cancer

    • benz145

      I appreciate the conversation, though I disagree on a few points. One was already noted by commenters elsewhere that you may be misunderstanding some of the numbers. The change in Chinese users last month (+7.21%) is among the entire population of Steam users, not just of Chinese users. That means just the increase in Chinese users in one month was 4x the total number of VR users (1.74%). So you can imagine how, if that population is less likely to own headsets, a large increase of that population could significantly sway the count.

      I’m not saying that this means that VR on Steam is necessarily growing; only that this is a variable that seems to be hiding a more reliable figure. As I said, we’ll be able to see in time.

      As for the changes in median new ratings for top 20 apps. I think you also may be misunderstanding this. The median is an average of new ratings each month. You are only looking at the change in median from one month to the next.

      Although the change hasn’t gone up much lately, the number of new reviews being received by the top 20 apps every month is still a healthy figure, as you can see:

      2021-02: 385
      2021-03: 365
      2021-04: 283
      2021-05: 333
      2021-06: 372
      2021-07: 401
      2021-08: 283

      Game buying/new releases/sales are all seasonal and these are the kind of fluctuations one would expect, especially with new Quest games launching fairly slowly (0.37 apps per day average since the first Quest launched in 2019). https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-quest-app-lab-100-apps-best-rated-most-popular/

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        I went back and did the whole calculation for the last few months, based on the assumption that 7.21% means 7.21% globally, not just relative to Chinese users. You simply need 19% monthly increase in global numbers to explain the reduced VR percentage without a massive drop in absolute VR user based. Based on that 38% of the drop from 2.04% to 1.74% could be due to an increase in Chinese users, while 62% has to have a different reason. I added a table to my comment about the math behind the calculation, including the impact this had in the previous months.

        The problem with a stable number of reviews is that you should see this only if the number of Quest owners doesn’t change. There could be additional factors, e.g. users could be more willing to post reviews in the first months of ownership, but if e.g. a Quest user will on average write a review for 10% of all the apps bought, then either the number of apps existing users buy or the number of Quest sold must fall to explain why the number of monthly reviews isn’t increasing.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        After spending way too much time on all this, correcting many of my assumptions, filling spreadsheets and editing a lot of my comments, I have reduced my claim to only 1/3rd of the drop not being caused by the increase in Chinese/Korean numbers, and a total absolute loss of 5.2%. I still have a number of doubts, as the language share increases seem to be very inconsistent over the months, and the 7.21% increase in Chinese user share on Steam would require an almost 50% jump in absolute Chinese user numbers. It would be more plausible if the -0.77% from July and the +7.21% from August were actually a 3.22% increase in both months, which for some reason was counted all towards August.

        The interesting result may be that this strange behavior might explain why we have seen the VR usage numbers jumping slightly up and down every other month for no obvious reasons. If some oddity in the way Steam counts monthly users causes e.g. the number of Chinese users to jump every two months, this could in turn lead to sudden jumps in the total absolute Steam numbers and thus would explain the strange zigzag pattern we see in the VR usage graph (and why Steam only publishes relative numbers). These oddities would probably not be specific to China, their numbers are just large enough to make the impact visible world wide.

        In the end it boils down that the relative numbers we have can be trusted even less, as we have to make a lot of assumptions to remove a number of external effects, so any trend that isn’t somewhat stable for at least half a year could be just an artifact. The closest thing to reliable absolute values that could be used for comparison is probably vrlfg, which comes with its own bag of dependencies.

  • Steven

    Perhaps the major issue is the lack of new quality VR titles on Steam. Originally, I wanted to purchase title on Steam rather than the Oculus store as I had every intention of not going down the Facebook path too far. However, I find myself shopping on the Oculus store more now as the VR section on Steam does not have as many titles that interest me for purchasing, as well as the complications of operating both Oculus and SteamVR. Add to that, Air Link and A good Anker battery pack, and I don’t even need to be connected to the PC directly.

    I don’t know the truth behind all the numbers, but I do know I want more quality titles. The next one for me will probably be Lone Echo 2, and if that is the last of the PCVR exclusive Oculus titles… and I don’t see a Half Life Alex quality title coming down the pipeline for PCVR. The only things left are to either replay older titles or look for the newer better titles made for the Quest 2, which so far have not really been impressing me.

    • nishanth12

      I only play Phasmophobia on Steam for VR games. That’s about it lately

      • SomeGuyorAnother

        Yeah, there’s only a handful of games I play on Steam, such as Skyrim, Fallout VR, No Man’s Sky, and Phasmo being the primary. Cross-buy titles have had a major effect on me buying on the Oculus store. I own quite a lot on both stores, but many I just don’t play anymore.

    • Rudl Za Vedno

      VR mod for Mechwarrior 5 is really good if you’re interested in robots.

      • Steven

        I am looking forward to checking that out!

  • 3872Orcs

    We need some excitement and hype again for VR to pick up speed I think. Last time that happened was with Half Life Alyx. Next generation of headsets with new tech features and triple A games would do it. Hopefully that starts with the PSVR2. Though end of 2022 is still a long way off :(

    Also I’m hoping to hear something official from Valve about Index 2 and that Citadel game. That could also fuel the fire for a while.

    And as much as I hate to say it; Facebook reaching 10 million users will also be a breakthrough moment I think.

  • Ad

    This sounds kind of like unclean data.

    • ViRGiN

      Said steamvr fanboy who makes errands informing people that there are more games out there, LOL

  • Rudl Za Vedno

    Monthly connected headsets on steam graph doesn’t look very optimistic. It’s probably due to lack of solid AA(A) VR titles. There’s nothing new on horizon with exception of Lone echo 2.

    • Ad

      There are no titles period. It’s weird how no one talks about how the number of new games post alyx feels like it’s half the year before, and a third of them are quest ports.It’s definitely slowing down.

      • Rudl Za Vedno

        I agree 100%. I own virtually all VR games I wanted. I used to buy 5 or more VR games on steam each month, now there’s no old titles left that would interest me and nothing exciting on horizon with exception of Lone Echo 2 and possibly Green hell. STAR WARS Squadrons, Ragnarock and Myst were the only games I bought in the last 10 months.

      • ViRGiN

        What the fuck are you talking about, when you’re the one spreading propaganda on Reddit that there are more games to look into?

      • Steven

        I can appreciate that Alyx and the sales figures from the Oculus store should inspire some studios. That being said, it is good to have titles with long play, like No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous. But I have to admit, I am looking for something to really sink my teeth into…

        I am really hoping for Starfield to be somewhat VR compatible….

        • Ad

          There is 0% chance of anything VR with starfield.

      • shadow9d9

        There are titles with good reviews that come out on a fairly regular basis. Alyx was just a linear corridor shooter with no story and the same 3 puzzles repeated through the whole game.

        • Ad

          There are very few releases, I just made a list of hundreds of PC games and maybe 20 are from the last year and ten are exclusive?

  • Skippy76

    The problem is that there are no more big releases.. haven’t seen one since Half Life Alyx!! The Oculus store has nothing more than short demos and ugly games because of the limited capabilities of the Quest 2 and even worse the Quest 1!!
    A lot of Quest Onward players have transitioned to the Steam version because the grafx are 100X better when using Air link or the link cable.
    The Quest is a nice portable device but most games are so short that the fun is over before you get your money’s worth!

    • ViRGiN

      LMAO focus your hate on steanvr which exactly, launched in 2016 and did nothing but Alex in 2020

      I enjoy all the blame shifting onto company that did the most, while the real villian is being cummed on

    • shadow9d9

      The Switch is ugly, but on its way to be the 2nd best selling console of all time. Graphics don’t make great games. There are many quality experiences coming out regularly on quest. Uploadvr, here, and vr grid highlight them. Maybe the real problem is that you don’t like a variety of genres.

  • VRFriend

    I own Reverb G2 and say there are almost no quality games to play. I play mainly Pavlov, sometimes visit VRChat. No new AAA-quality game = losses for VR. Damn developers don’t release games for VR.

    • shadow9d9

      “AAA” means bloated repetition generally. PCVR has horrible retention and games on sony or quest sell much better, so I suspect that the majority of development will focus there.

  • Steven

    I hope so, there are some really interesting things out there, but some more AAA titles would be fantastic!

  • Cragheart

    It will go up again.

  • Cless

    You seem awfully sure. Do you mind sharing your “Enlighted knowledge” with the rest of us?