Website Tracks Just How Few VR Users There Are on Steam

VRLFG.net is the place to go, pulling data from Steam's API to track people playing VR-compatible games and software. This came out of a conversation I had with a VR developer over this post last week, pointing out how few people seem to be using multiplayer VR. As of this writing (according to VRLFG) there's less than 2500 players total across all VR games on Steam (out of some 8-12 million concurrent Steam users). AltSpaceVR, which is perhaps closest to Sansar and High Fidelity in the social VR space, currently shows just 14 total players (23 total over the last 24 hours). There's an estimated 750,000-1.5 million owners of Oculus or Vive headsets now on the market, so you'd except at least 1% of them would be using their devices on Steam. But actual usage is well below 1%.

But hey, VR support is coming to MacBooks and MacOS, so that should totally change soon, right? 

Comments

[Amanda Dallin]

The problem is more inherent in the headset form factor. Gamers can't easily drink their favorite drink and eat their favorite snacks while immersed in something with a headset. These are just examples. Cutting the real world out to such a degree is not convenient for most people for any length of time.

[Cyberserenity]

Amanda is right. After about 30 minutes you want to go back to ordinary screen play.

[Mac]

I agree with Amanda and Cyberserenity. I want to be able to see/hear/interact with my 'real' world at the same time as my 'virtual', and having my head & eyes encased in a cocoon makes that difficult. I can't jump up and go to the kitchen on a whim, or jump up from my chair to attend to a kid, pet, etc, without a load of fuss. Screen play allows me to do real and virtual simultaneously. VR headsets seal off the real world from me, and I don't like that.

[Carlos Loff]

Street Arcades will be the business, you get in for one unfirgetable hour and enjoy bigger, wider, stronger gadgets - You plan your day out to the arcade, unplug RL, plug VR, have a hell of an adventure, most probably with friends, and than unplug VR and plug RL - Just like going to the movies

[JohnC]

As we progress through life we attach ourselves to more and more new inventions of experience and convenience, along with all our physical and mental desires, all of which have a sell by date which we usually ignore. Are we to avoid them or treat them all with extreme caution simply because they are not eternal. Your family and friends will all die one day, in many cases, far sooner than you think, does that mean it's best not to dwell to much on your parents, get married, have a family or get close to anyone so you can avoid the inevitable experience of loss.
So called “reality” is just as prone to the equivalent of power outages and sudden irreversible changes as any other form of experience, and those who experience these things go just a crazy as may those who loose some future happy virtual life. A lot of people seem to me to have to much faith in an imagined, romanticized concept of a set in stone reality that we all supposedly share. But as touched upon by Ryan, personal reality is just a mental construct we create for ourselves from incoming stimuli, filtered through our own twisted network of social and personal complexes. By the time it is presented to our conscious mind the original incoming information is far from the raw sensory data that was originally presented to it. In a sense most, if not all, of us already dwell in the virtual world of the mind, spending most of our days considering our thought's about reality rather than experiencing it as it really is.

[JohnC]

At Carlos,so disappear into the forest or the jungle and live a real human life, full of sensory experiences and meaningful relationships with others who feel the same. Leave all this tech sh..t behind. My father used to say” you sound like a guy sitting in front of the fire complaining that he is hot” You just said you were in SL for ten years and more, so was I. But I knew that it was my natural home the moment I got there. I wasn't lead astray there by promises of fantastic other worlds, created like gingerbread houses to lure me away from reality. In fact I was responsible in many cases for perpetuating the grand illusion by creating little webs of other worlds that many people used as a means of escape for great periods of their life. I am not sure I identify at all with your idea of great tech industries and grand schemes of social experimentation happening at this moment in the real world. I guess I am just to dumb to see it. It does reminds me a lot though of a Sci Fi RP scenario I set up in SL of a future world run by a Mega Corporation oppressing the citizens. As I said on another thread, IMHO,as far as I can see, like it or not, some kind of amalgamation of mind and machine is inevitable in the future evolution of humanity. In order to stop this would require a step backwards to the past, as advocated by many religious groups. In fact this will probably be the outcome in the near future, one group of humanity will attempt to halt evolution, and one will attempt to further it for better or worse. It's just another choice we may have to make.
I love this quote from Martin Rees, It allows me to get along with my own little meaningless existence and stops me worrying about the future, its just far, far bigger and more astonishing that we could ever imagine.
“Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6bn years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

[Yourthere Sometimes]

What if those steam gamers got offered Lindimals, some really great breedables that could auto-feed directly off of your credit card direct from the lab, surefire way to get them to try SL, maybe.