SteamVR December 2019 Stats: Which VR Headsets Gained Over Christmas?
Valve has just released the VR user statistics for the month of December 2019. Here is a look at some of the PC VR Christmas Eve shopping boom.
Facebook marketing strategy for the Christmas Eve appears to have bore results. During the Christmas shopping spree, the price-performance winner among the virtual reality headsets, the Oculus Rift S, gained more than 3.5% market share as shown in the table below. The Rift S virtual reality headsets were released in May 2019 and now account for roughly a fifth of all the PC VR virtual reality headsets that are connected to Steam.
The strong performance can also be attributed to the Oculus Quest users that have plugged their standalone virtual reality headsets to PC via the Oculus Link connection and are playing virtual reality games on Steam. The Steam platform recognizes Oculus Quest headsets plugged in via Link as Rift S headsets.
Meanwhile, the original Oculus Rift VR headset has lost considerable ground. It is conceivable that some of the Rift users replaced their VR headsets with newer Rift-S model over the Christmas shopping bonanza. Overall, the Rift headsets are still accounting for more than a half of the PC VR headsets market on Steam.
High-End VR Grew in December 2019
In December, the Valve Index headset grew by 1.7% in spite of the fact that it costs more than twice the price of the Oculus Rift S headset. Valve’s market share growth was most probably driven by the Half-Life: Alyx hype which is set to launch early this year.
On the other hand, HTC Vive lost a lot of ground and now accounts for just less than 3% of the market share. The HTC Vive Pro headset has, however, gained some little ground. The HTC Vive Cosmos, successor to the Vive, is still not captured in the Steam statistics. This headset was released in October 2019. The Windows Mixed Reality headset also do not feature.
The table below provides an overview of Steam performance for the disparate virtual reality headsets for the months of November and December. The data indicates the percentage values of the VR headsets that are tethered to PC whose users participated in the Steam survey. It does not include statistics from other virtual reality platforms such as Viveport and the Oculus ecosystem.
| November 2019 | December 2019 | |
|---|---|---|
| Oculus Rift | 35.55% | 32.91% (- 2.64%) |
| Oculus Rift S | 14.83% | 18.4% (+ 3.57%) |
| HTC Vive | 32.64% | 29.83% (- 2.81%) |
| HTC Vive Pro | 2.05% | 2.43% (+ 0.38%) |
| Windows Mixed Reality | 5.08% | 4.75% (- 0.33%) |
| Valve Index | 4.93% | 6.65% (+ 1.72%) |
SteamVR User Base is Declining
Should the Valve statistics prove accurate, they show that the proportion of virtual reality users either declined sharply in the month of December or Steam has gained numerous users without virtual reality headsets over the past few months. In the months of October and November, more than 1% of all Steam users had virtual reality headsets connected to PCs. In December, this figure stood at only 0.87% in spite of the Half-Life: Alyx announcement. Both Oculus Rift S and Valve Index grew by a minute 0.01%.
| November 2019 | December 2019 | |
|---|---|---|
| Oculus Rift | 0.36% | 0.29% (- 0.07%) |
| Oculus Rift S | 0.15% | 0.16% (+ 0.01%) |
| HTC Vive | 0.33% | 0.26% (- 0.07%) |
| HTC Vive Pro | 0.02% | 0.02% |
| HTC Vive Cosmos | 0.00% | 0.00% |
| Windows Mixed Reality | 0.10% | 0.08% (- 0.02%) |
| Valve Index | 0.05% | 0.06% (+ 0.01%) |
| Oculus Rift DK2 | 0.01% | 0.00% (- 0.01%) |
| Overall | 1.02% | 0.87% (-0.15%) |
