#STEAM VR HEADSET STATS SOFTWARE#

We have seen the Steam Hardware & Software Survey report some funky VR numbers here and there over the years, but usually a correction comes within a week or so. Until then, we can only really wait to see if next month’s data brings any answers. Road to VR has reached out to three separate people at Valve, on multiple occasions, for comment on the data, but we’ve received no response. As for this big drop in the last month, we haven’t been able to come up with any clear explanation. While it’s easy to look at the data and see that there have been upswings that are nearly, or as large, as the drop, the major upswings have had fairly clear explanations: the big jump from March 2020 to April 2020 was largely due to the launch of Half-Life: Alyx, while the jump from December 2020 to January 2021 was likely due to the holiday season (with Quest 2 having just recently launched). In fact, it’s the single largest drop we’ve ever seen in the data set-from 2.31% to 1.86%-which is why it stood out as perciular. In the latest data we saw a surprisingly sharp drop in headsets used on Steam. The number of monthly-connected VR headsets on Steam has always seen ups and downs, but last month was different. We’ve been tracking the data on VR headsets published in the Steam Hardware & Software survey ever since first-gen VR headsets hit the market. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Steam vr headset stats