SteamVR February 2020 Hardware Survey Shows a Decrease in VR Usage
The monthly Steam survey for February is out. There wasn’t much action in the month of February and the proportion of Virtual Reality users also fell following the Christmas high.
The Oculus Rift S headset made some strong gains in the month of February 2020 and overtook HTC Vive for the first time. The Rift S now accounts for more than a quarter of all the SteamVR headsets. The original Oculus Rift is still the most used virtual reality headset on Steam.
Valve Index, which has been heavily backordered over the past month or so also saw some growth in its market share although the growth wasn’t a strong one. The headset has been sold out for weeks as Valve has been unable to keep up with the production schedules following disruptions by the COVD-19 (Coronavirus) crisis.
Check out the tabular overview below that shows Steam performance for the months of January and February 2020. The table shows the percentage of virtual reality headsets that are connected to PCs whose users are able to take part in the monthly Steam survey.
| January 2020 | February 2020 | |
|---|---|---|
| Oculus Rift | 30.36% | 28.14% (-2.22%) |
| Oculus Rift S | 24.34% | 26.4% (+2.06%) |
| HTC Vive | 26.91% | 26.14% (-0.77%) |
| HTC Vive Pro | 2.01% | 2.22% (+0.21%) |
| HTC Vive Cosmos | 0.60% | 0.47% (-0.13%) |
| Windows Mixed Reality | 8.05% | 8.31% (+0.26%) |
| Valve Index | 7.22% | 7.69% (+0.47%) |
The survey does not capture users of other Virtual Reality platforms that have not installed Steam such as the Viveport and the Oculus ecosystem. It doesn’t therefore provide a complete picture of the hardware market but it goes a long way in helping us make sense of a large portion of the market. The survey also does not capture standalone virtual reality headsets such as Oculus Quest.
According to the Valve statistics, the proportion of virtual reality users relative to the overall Steam user base dropped sharply in February 2020 and settled back to the pre-Christmas level after a holiday hike. Many Steam users could also have joined the platform in February which would distort the stats to an extent.
The new survey also includes an “Unknown” category which most likely refers to the Oculus Quest users that have connected to a PC via the Oculus Link connection.
In the table below, you can see the percentages from the Steam monthly survey translated into monthly active SteamVR user numbers. According to Valve, there are 95 million active Steam users every month which serves as the base value for the data below.
| January 2020 | February 2020 | |
|---|---|---|
| Oculus Rift | 380,000 (0.40%) | 247,000 (0.26%) |
| Oculus Rift S | 304,000 (0.32%) | 228,000 (0.26%) |
| HTC Vive | 332,500 (0.35%) | 228,000 (0.26%) |
| HTC Vive Pro | 28,500 (0.03%) | 19,000 (+0.02%) |
| HTC Vive Cosmos | 9,500 (0.01%) | 0 (0.00%) |
| Windows Mixed Reality | 95,000 (0.10%) | 76,000 (0.08%) |
| Valve Index | 85,500(0.09%) | 66,500 (0.07%) |
| Oculus Rift DK2 | 9,500 (0.01%) | 0 (0.00%) |
| Unknown | 0 (0.00%) | 57,000 (0.06%) |
| Overall | 1,244, 500 (1.31%) | 921,500 (0.97%) |
