Despite Years of Reports to the Contrary, PC VR Just Won’t Die—In fact, It’s Growing

The XR landscape has changed significantly over the last five years with the flourishing of standalone headsets and new entrants like Apple and (soon) Google. Despite all of that, the PC VR platform has continued a slow but steady growth.

So much has happened in VR in last five years that if you had told me back in early 2020, I’m not sure I would have believed you.

After all, you’d have to say that Facebook is no longer called Facebook. And that the company went on to dissolve the ‘Oculus’ brand, which had long been the most recognizable name in the industry for enthusiasts and even outsiders. And you’d have to tell me that despite that, Facebook Meta still managed to turn its standalone Quest headset into the leading VR platform.

Not only that, you’d have to convince me that Apple would dive head-first into the market with its own headset… and it would cost $3,500! Oh and that Google would follow quickly behind with a complete Android XR operating system underpinning a flagship headset made by Samsung.

Not to mention Microsoft discontinuing its Windows MR platform and giving up on HoloLens (ok actually, that one I might have believed).

Despite all of this, the OG VR platform—PC VR—is still kicking, and has in fact continued to grow.

Monthly-connected Headsets on Steam Over the Last Five Years

Each month Valve collects info from Steam users to determine some baseline statistics about what kind of hardware and software is used by the platform’s population, and to see how things are changing over time, including the use of VR headsets.

The data shared in the survey represents the number of headsets connected to Steam over a given month, so we call the resulting figure ‘monthly-connected headsets’ for clarity; it’s the closest official figure there is to ‘monthly active VR users’ on Steam, with the caveat that it only tells us how many VR headsets were connected, not how many were actually used.

While Valve’s data is a useful way see which headsets are most popular on Steam, the trend of monthly-connected headsets is obfuscated because the data is given exclusively as percentages relative to Steam’s population—which itself is an unstated and constantly fluctuating figure.

If you looked only at the percent of VR users on Steam, you’d think the category must be shrinking.

But this isn’t the whole story. You need to take into account that the Steam population itself has grow a lot over the last five years. In fact, the Steam population has nearly doubled in that time.

To demystify the data Road to VR maintains a model—based on the historical survey data along with official data points directly from Valve and Steam—which aims to account for Steam’s changing population and estimate the actual count (not just the percent)—of headsets being used on Steam.

In this way we can see that the raw number of VR headsets in use on Steam has actually been slowly but steadily growing over time.

So the reality is that while Steam itself is growing faster proportionally than SteamVR users, the total number of VR users has been steadily climbing. Put another way: even though the percent of the Steam population using VR headsets is decreasing, from a developer standpoint, the number of potential VR customers has been growing.

This surely wouldn’t be the case if Valve hadn’t set up SteamVR from the outset as an open platform which any headset maker can opt into. There’s at least 24 different headsets in use on the platform each month, making SteamVR by far the largest and most diverse PC VR ecosystem.

PC VR no doubt also has Meta to thank for its continued growth after all these years and changes to the landscape. The wide availability and low cost of Quest headsets has brought many new people into the VR fold, and some of them wind up using the headset for PC VR too. Meta headsets account for a whopping 70% of monthly-connected headsets on Steam today.

What will the next five years hold for PC VR? We’ll see you in 2030 to find out!