VR Headsets on the Rise Thanks To Half Life: Alyx

Since the launch of Half-Life: Alyx, there has been a boost in sales of Virtual Reality hardware, but according to April’s Steam Hardware Survey, the percentage of players who has a VR headset is just a 1.91%.

While 1.91% seems very low for a technology that has been around for quite some time, is important to consider that Steam has over 20m of concurrent users each day, over a 100 million users registered. The two most played games on the platform are Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. This might indicate that a big part of the concurrent users are, new players who are starting to build their Steam library.

Reports from UploadVR reveals that players who use a 4K display are just 2.14%, interesting as the resolution has been targeted by GPU manufacturers and consoles in the recent years. NVIDIA’s RTX 2080 Ti GPU owners are just 0.77%.

Certainly, playing on VR and having a GPU that can deliver the desired results does not come cheap. Players who are just upgrading their machine might opt for a 4K resolution that would also serve for next gen consoles. There is also a vast amount of players who wants to play competitive, for those players, FPS is more desirable than 4K and VR.

VR Headsets are slowly becoming an important market for game developers and a more interesting option for players. GameIndustry reports that PlayStation VR sold over five million units by 2019, HTC Vive is still the preferred VR Headset, followed by Oculus Rift S.

However, the Oculus Quest saw a significant rise in new users, increasing by 3.14% since March’s survey. This was the single biggest increase of any device, making the Quest the headset of choice for 6% of Steam’s VR users.

Source: GameIndustry

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