Shock Stat: In 2017, Only 12 of All VR-Compatible 983 Games for Sale on Steam (~1%) Sold 50,000+ Copies

Chart via the report on the Ganbatte dev blog

VRChat is seeing a huge spike in user activity, making it social VR's first breakout hit -- however, one big qualifier to that VRChat is free to play, while most VR headset owners are mostly unwilling to pay for VR content. Read this thoroughly researched blog post from Thomas Papa, who runs a small VR game studio called Mimicry, creator of the upcoming game Ganbatte. (I.E. Not an analyst or evangelist over-hyping the VR market, but someone whose livelihood depends on working with the VR market as it actually exists.)

Here's how many VR games there were on Steam last year, being sold for 1$ or more: 983

And here's how many people on Steam bought those games:

Only 12 titles (out of 983) managed to reach more than 50.000 owners. That’s 1.2% of all titles. Out of these 12 titles, almost half (5) are also playable in non-VR mode, namely: Scanner Sombre, Everspace, Star Trek Bridge Crew, Project Cars 2 and Space Pirates And Zombies 2. This means that out of all premium (1USD+) VR supported titles released in 2017 (983), only 7 VR-only titles have managed to reach more than 50.000 owners.

In another words, hardly any VR games made any significant revenue last year, and only a handful of those likely made any actual profit. (VR games easily cost six-eight figures to produce, let alone market.)

Papa's conclusion:

 Channels like the Oculus Store, the PlayStation Store, Viveport and others allow us to reach even more customers. However, going by these numbers alone, it’s going to be hard for most VR titles to come close to breaking even. This might explain the increase in average price. There’s a market, but despite its growth, it’s still small. At the current market size, in order for developers to make enough profit to finance their next VR game, the price has to go up. Although another perspective might be: the quality of the games must go up (and sales will follow).

Another possible conclusion: If you must make a VR game, make it extremely low budget. Or maybe better yet, make a game optimized for PC and mobile, and pay someone part time to create a VR port. Or if you're Linden Lab, hope you keep getting Warner Brothers and other big companies to create branded content on your VR platform.

Comments

[Pulsar]

That says a lot and I agree with your conclusions. Moreover prices for RAM and high-end graphic cards have been risen quite a lot in the past year. The latter because of cryptocurrency mining craze: more demand, higher prices. And I guess those graphic cards went mostly to large mining farms, rather to simple computers.
https://www.techspot.com/article/1562-build-a-pc-bad-idea-gpu-pricing/
So people aren't likely to happily upgrade their machines for VR now, not so much.