December 2024 noticed the second highest share of Steam avid gamers utilizing a VR headset ever, when adjusted for Chinese language customers.
Valve lists the proportion of “Steam customers with VR Headsets” in December 2024 as 2.13%. With out adjustment, that is not outstanding. However when adjusting the figures for every month since Valve began reporting this determine to be relative to the variety of non-Chinese language customers, as China basically has its personal tangential VR market, it is the second highest ever.
Even with out this adjustment, the info reveals that extra Steam avid gamers use a VR headset than use macOS or personal an RTX 4090 GPU. Additional, virtually as many use a VR headset than use Linux, which incorporates Steam Deck, and round half as many use one than personal a 4K main monitor. So PC VR stays a relative area of interest, sure, however no extra so than a Steam Deck or the highest-end NVIDIA graphics card.
The figures come after the Meta Horizon app, required to arrange Quest headsets, was the #1 free iPhone app on Christmas Day, and as Quest 3S seems to be outselling conventional video games consoles on Amazon US, suggesting that VR gross sales surged over the vacation interval.
Damaged out by relative headset share, Quest 3S and Valve Index noticed essentially the most utilization progress. As we famous in our reporting on November’s information, although, some Quest 3S utilization is definitely listed as ‘Quest 3’, which means that each one we are able to precisely say is that Quest 3 and Quest 3S collectively made up 22.1% of SteamVR utilization in December.
As we progress into 2025, a brand new wave of compact high-end PC VR headsets with 4K micro-OLED shows are set to reach, together with Shiftall MeganeX superlight and Pimax Dream Air. With steep pricing, these headsets are unlikely to result in a shift available in the market, however may improve retention amongst lovers. In the meantime, the controllers for the brand new headset Valve has been engaged on for years leaked again in November, suggesting 2025 may very well be the yr the proprietor of Steam lastly breathes new life into its high-end VR ecosystem.
