Image: Valve
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The Pico 4 standalone VR headset captures the top market share on SteamVR. Quest Pro, on the other hand, is barely noticeable.
Pico 4 is considered the first serious competitor to Meta Quest 2 (review) and launched on October 18, 2022 in 13 European countries as well as Japan and South Korea. It’s unclear if and when Pico 4 will hit the biggest VR market, the United States.
The device is primarily intended for standalone use like Meta Quest 2. However, it supports wired or wireless connection to a PC, including for use as SteamVR glasses. Both work very well, as MIXED contributor Ben found in his Pico 4 test.
2% of Steam users use VR headsets
Valve monthly hardware and software survey covers all VR headsets that connect to Steam at least once during this month and whose users participate in data collection. Statistics include the percentage of SteamVR users out of the total Steam user base.
The highest value recorded to date is 2.31% (May 2021). In November 2022, it was 2.03 percent. Assuming Steam averaged 132 million monthly active users last year, SteamVR should have around 2.7 million users.
Percentage of users per headset
The following statistics show the market shares of VR headsets covered by Steam as of November 2022. Devices that have less than half a percent market share are not listed.
VR users exclusively on Meta and Viveport platforms who have not installed Steam or participated in Steam data collection are not captured by statistics, nor are PSVR players and Meta Quest 1 & 2 users who do not. only use their VR headset independently. As a result, SteamVR stats only reflect a small portion of the entire VR market.
| November 2022 | Difference | |
|---|---|---|
| Meta Quest 2 | 41.12% | – 0.37% |
| valve index | 17.52% | +0.01% |
| Oculus Rift S | 13.37% | – 0.50% |
| HTC Vive | 7.02% | +0.01% |
| Oculus Rift | 6.29% | – 0.01% |
| Windows Mixed Reality | 5.25% | – 0.06% |
| Meta Quest | 2.56% | – 0.09% |
| HTC Vive Pro | 1.43% | +0.01% |
| HTC Vive Cosmos | 1.23% | +0.14% |
| HTC Vive Pro 2 | 0.69% | +0.04% |
| Peak 4 | 0.67% | +0.48% |
| Pico Neo 3 | 0.64% | +0.07% |
| SteamVR User Base | 2.03% | +0.13% |
Where are Pico and Meta?
The Pico 4 started to secure its market share as early as October 2022, but the device didn’t have a bigger impact until November. Market share increased by 0.48 percentage points, from 0.19% to 0.67%.
This means Pico 4 has grown faster than any other VR headset (at least his use of SteamVR did). The Meta Quest Pro (review), which also launched in October and is four times more expensive, is likely reflected in the “Other” category not listed above, which increased by 0.13 percentage points.
More important is how the device performs after the holiday shopping season. If the Pico 4 continues to win, it could overtake the HTC Vive Pro 2, HTC Vive Cosmos, and HTC Vive Pro next month, and maybe even gain ground.
SteamVR stats only provide relative and indirect information about actual sales success, especially regarding Meta Quest 2, since both devices are mostly used in their standalone functionality.
For Pico, however, the the catch-up race has just begun, as shown in the following SteamVR market share graph. This table sums all VR headsets from a manufacturer or platform (Windows Mixed Reality).
Meta dominates SteamVR with devices like Meta Quest 1 & 2 and Oculus Rift (S). | Image: MIXED
The PC VR market is dormant
The frequency and intensity of use of SteamVR headsets cannot be gathered from the monthly Steam survey. The following statistic, which shows the monthly average of maximum concurrent SteamVR users, gives a rough idea.
This number reached a new high of 24,000 in January 2022, which declined over the following months and stood at approximately 15,000 in November. For the end of the year, an increase is expected due to seasonal factors.
The PC VR market has barely grown in recent years. The most obvious reasons are lack of big PC VR games and high graphics card prices.
Valve was only able to give PC VR a temporary boost with Valve Index (review) and Half-Life: Alyx, and has since left the platform to its fate. It’s not yet known if and when the company is releasing new hardware and software and breathing new life into SteamVR, despite rumors of a new device called Deckard.
It’s possible that some high-quality PSVR 2 games will leak to SteamVR in the coming years. That way, more PC VR fans would have reason to turn their devices back on.
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