VR can be a bit of a divisive topic when it comes to gaming. There’s a dedicated group of folks who see it as the future of the medium (or at least a big part of the future) and others who see it as either a fad or something that will never take over ‘traditional’ gaming. This divide flared up with the release of Half-Life: Alyx. The return to the legendary franchise was a VR-only affair, which disappointed longtime fans who had no interest in VR. Well, that debate will no doubt rage on, but if you want to get an idea of how niche VR currently is, this new survey shows it’s still running on a pretty small base.
Valve released a recent hardware survey. It was the first survey to be taken a month after the release of Alyx. It showed that in April 2020, 950,000 additional VR headsets were connected during this period, totalling an estimated 2.7 million headsets. While this is a record gain by a large margin, it still is only 1.9% of all active Steam users.
Now, it is worth keeping in mind here that this measured active headsets, so it’s possible that there is some amount of error, since technically headsets not plugged in and active would be counted, obviously. But even if you were to say there was an error of even a million here, it’s still a very low percentage overall. It just goes to show, VR is interesting tech, but it’s got a long way to go before it hits the mainstream- though games like Alyx will certainly help it get there faster.
