At the start of the New Year Valve has released a look back at 2017’s best selling VR titles on Steam.
Just in time for the end of the Steam Winter Sale (concluding January 4th @ 10AM PT), Valve has published a series of ‘The Best of 2017‘ charts, showing which titles on Steam have fared the best across several metrics. Among the charts is a list of the top 100 best selling VR games on Steam in 2017, as measured by gross revenue.
The chart is broken into tiers ranging from Bronze to Platinum. Refreshing the page shuffles the titles in each tier, meaning we can’t tell directly how individual games in each tier stack up in terms of revenue, we only know that games in a higher tier had higher revenue than games in a lower tier.
Here’s a look at the Gold and Platinum tiers; in an effort to roughly estimate the range of revenues within each tier we’ve estimated total gross revenue (not just 2017) based on data from SteamSpy (assuming MSRP for all sales), and sorted each tier by that figure. It’s also worth noting that some of these titles (like Fallout 4 VR and Tilt Brush) are or were bundled at one time with sales of the HTC Vive, a confounding variable in the total gross estimation.
Platinum
| Game | Release | Estimated Total Gross | Owners |
| Fallout 4 VR | 2017 | $4,731,120.00 | 78,852 |
| Arizona Sunshine | 2016 | $4,721,400.00 | 118,035 |
| Raw Data | 2017 [prev. EA] | $4,283,320.00 | 107,083 |
| Tilt Brush | 2016 | $4,025,360.00 | 201,268 |
| Job Simulator | 2016 | $3,416,940.00 | 170847 |
| Audioshield | 2016 | $2,803,640.00 | 140,182 |
| SUPERHOT VR | 2017 | $2,561,475.00 | 102,459 |
| Onward | 2016 [EA] | $2,409,375.00 | 96,375 |
| Space Pirate Trainer | 2017 [prev. EA] | $2,372,865.00 | 158,191 |
| Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality | 2017 | $1,839,900.00 | 61,330 |
| Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades | 2016 [EA] | $1,557,580.00 | 77,879 |
| Gorn | 2017 [EA] | $1,392,080.00 | 69,604 |
Looking at the chart against our estimated revenue data, Fallout 4 VR, despite being released less than a month ago, found itself among the top grossing VR titles of 2017 thanks to a relatively high $60 price point and a release surrounded by lots of buzz.
Interestingly, and perhaps worryingly for VR content development, half of 2017’s Platinum sellers were launched in 2016 (or even more than half if we counted Raw Data and Space Pirate Trainer as being launched in 2016 given their Early Access debut that year). This would imply that 2017 hasn’t seen very many VR hits launched on Steam compared to 2016, which itself could mean several different things, but without more data, speculating further isn’t particularly useful.
Gold
| Game | Release | Estimated Total Gross | Owners |
| Virtual Desktop | 2016 | $2,467,785.00 | 164,519 |
| Vanishing Realms | 2016 [EA] | $1,973,120.00 | 98,656 |
| Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope | 2017 | $1,508,920.00 | 37,723 |
| Sairento VR | 2016 [EA] | $956,460.00 | 31,882 |
| The Talos Priciple VR | 2017 | $827,480.00 | 20,687 |
| Paranomal Activity the Lost Soul | 2017 | $798,240.00 | 19,956 |
| Doom VFR | 2017 | $781,230.00 | 26,041 |
| Batman Arkham VR | 2017 | $681,440.00 | 34,072 |
| Pavlov | 2017 [EA] | $593,830.00 | 59,383 |
| I Expect You to Die | 2017 | $559,750.00 | 22,390 |
| Dead Effect 2 VR | 2017 [prev. EA] | $541,500.00 | 21,660 |
| QuiVr (2016) | 2016 [EA] | $486,740.00 | 24,337 |
In the Gold tier, a smaller portion (25%) of 2017’s top grossing games were released in 2016, suggesting that a number of VR titles released in 2017 are working their way up the charts, but not at particularly accelerated rate compared to 2016.
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Looking for 2017’s top VR games across platforms? Check out Road to VR’s 2017 Game of the Year winners.
Update (1/2/18): Indicated that some of the titles in the list of top sellers are or were bundled with sales of the Vive at one time or another.