Steam's VR Ecosystem is a Microclimate: Vast Majority of Virtual Reality Apps Attract Little Ownership

Here's some very valuable VR numbers crunching from Tristan Parrish Moore of VR developer Broken Window Studios, who went through the data of virtual reality apps sold on Steam, and came up with this sobering chart above, counting "owners" of VR apps for Oculus Rift and HTV Vive sold on the massive game distribution service. (Steam counts over 125 million active users.) As I blogged last Tuesday, HTC Vive has sold around 100,000 units so far, with all models of the Oculus Rift (developer versions and recent consumer model) selling around 200,000-225,000 total. However, when it comes to actual usage of actual VR apps on Steam, 84% are "owned" by less than 20,000 people. (And "owned" includes people who own the game via a free key, versus actually buying it.) So again, not only is the market for VR devices still extremely small, almost all the people who own a high-end virtual reality device are buying very few VR apps.

For Moore, this leads to some very sensible conclusions for VR content creators:

I think it’s important at this point in time to measure expectations of the future VR market, at least until things start to pick up speed. As I stated previously, 64% of the games currently on Steam have sold less than 10,000 copies, and it’s currently extremely unlikely to sell over 100,000. While that is likely to change in the coming months, the VR market is currently not a healthy place to sustain a AAA budgeted game that doesn’t have an alternate market. While games with budgets of under $100,000 have a reasonably good chance to return the investment, anything over that is a serious gamble, and anything over a $1,000,000 budget is bordering on impossible.

Emphasis mine, because WTF. For developers of VR-centric applications we write about a lot here, High Fidelity and Project Sansar, that should elicit a double WTF:

Linden Lab will easily spend close to $20 million developing Project Sansar before it even launches, just in developer salaries alone. Yet we are still in very very early days of this unproven ecosystem, and unless literally 1 in 4 of all current Rift and Vive owners embrace Sansar and/or High Fidelity, it's very difficult to see how they'll gain substantial early adopter traction this year or even next. The numbers are so risky, I'd even put it this way: Linden Lab, Philip: For the next two-three years, maybe start marketing Sansar and High Fidelity as virtual worlds primarily for PC and mobile, with VR compatibility -- instead of the other way around.

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Comments

[Cyberserenity]

I use my Oculus for Second life and Flight simulator. Almost nothing else. Checking Altspace VR and High fidelity sometimes to see what they are doing.

Most games are better on a ordinary screen. I play many but never in VR. Development is not good enough.