Half Life: Alyx Usage Figures Suggest It's Not VR's Killer App After All

Today's Half-Life:Alyx stats on Steam

Couple somewhat surprising data points (via SteamDB) since Half-Life Alyx debuted last week, attracting the highest user concurrencies (nearly 43,000) for a VR-only game:

• Usage hasn't reached anywhere near that peak since then. I had thought the game might have seen a significant uptick last weekend, as people who bought it would have more free time to play. (Then again, under quarantine, don't we all have way more time on our hands?) But, no.
• If you look at Half-Life: Alyx's usage patterns, there's almost always way more people on Twitch watching Half-Life: Alyx being played, than actually playing Half-Life: Alyx. That was even true shortly after Alyx went live last week, with nearly 100,000 Twitch viewers watching while half those numbers played.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this data strongly suggests two suppositions:

• Sales for Alyx have dropped off sharply, and it's simply not driving sales of VR headsets anywhere near as we all hoped. (You know, how it was supposed to be VR's "killer app".)
• General interest in Alyx (and for that matter, the Half-Life franchise) remains strong -- all those Twitch viewers! -- but that interest is not translating into actual sales of the game, let alone the VR headset needed to play it.

Valve has said they have no plans to release a non-VR version of Alyx (though expects modders will make unofficial versions). Which, based on its popularity on Twitch, seems like a mistake. Valve may still repackage the game with a VR headset for the upcoming holidays, and see some success that way. But for now, at least,  Alyx's ability to drive VR sales seems far from certain.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

It's always the obsession with a killer app.

Killer apps make fads, not platforms.

What Alyx is, is a good game. Probably one of the first, or second, depending on how much you got out of Beat Saber. What Alyx is is a full length, VR-expensive game, and there's not many of them. What Alyx is, is what would make VR successful if we had a whole library of titles like Alyx.

And that's why it's celebrated; this is one of the kind of games we need an entire bookshelf of.

[seph]

"Sales for Alyx have dropped off sharply, and it's simply not driving sales of VR headsets anywhere near as we all hoped."

"but that interest is not translating into actual sales of the game, let alone the VR headset needed to play it."

But the Valve Index is sold out and has been selling out since it's been available. I'm sure they don't want to be 8-weeks backordered but I don't think they're having an issue selling the hardware.

Also I don't think Valve cares about selling Half-Life: Alyx itself, it's free with every Valve Index purchase and it's being bundled with partners' headsets like Vive's new Cosmos Elite for free.

Half-Life: Alyx is only 10-15 hours of gameplay, it wasn't meant to hold people's attention longer than that is another consideration. The longevity plan seems to be the same as all previous Half-Life games, which is letting the community create more content for it.

Tools have been released for the Source 2 engine to help with modding Alyx along with Hammer, a new level editor built with creating levels for Alyx in mind.

Time will tell how popular mods and levels for Alyx will increase the longevity of it, but I'd say Half-Life mods have been pretty successful in the past (Black Mesa, Cry of Fear...) and many that started as mods have become full games (Counter-Strike, Portal, Garry's Mod, Stanley Parable...)

I have no delusions that as many hit spin-offs from previous Half-Life releases will come from Alyx's mod community given how small the VR user base still is, but given the success rate of prior Half-Life mods, I'd be surprised if nothing at all comes along to be a pretty popular and supported by Valve even.

All and all we'll have to wait to see if Alyx is a 'killer app'. It would've been a mistake to judge Half-Life 1 or 2's legacy based on a single run of it's standalone story rather than the plethora of mods and full games that resulted from them.

[Navjack27]

Hopefully they are counting early index sales as Alyx sales. I bought an Index for this game but circumstances are preventing me from playing as I don't have access to the computer hardware I had months ago right at this moment with the virus stuff going on. I'm fixing that this month and I'll be putting hours in though.

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

It was to be expected. The game is expensive, and VR headsets have still lots of issues. There is NO SINGLE VR KILLER APP. We need a killer ecosystem. And Alyx has helped the ecosystem giving vr lots of visibility

[asd]

Check the owners number.... https://steamspy.com/app/546560
Owners: 500,000 .. 1,000,000
Not hard.

[Ron Kramer]

IT's no NO MAN'S SKY. But I had to support it by buying it. Controls are not as intuitive as no man's sky and I can play NMS for 6+ hours without wanting to get out. After about 1 hour of ALYX I need a break.

[Carlos D. Gaerza]

e all waned Half life 3 or at least Haslf life 2 episode 2. Valve can suck an egg if they expect us to be loyal after trolling us for 10+ years with another half life then giving us Alyx VR is just anj insult hoping to rive up VR sales.

[SnakeTheFox]

It's simply too expensive.

That's it. That's literally all there is to it. No more analysis necessary, really.

Buying in to VR, even on second hand, 1st gen equipment, will run you upwards of $300-400 at least. And that's not counting the overall hardware requirements you've got to meet too, in an age where GPUs cost two arms and two legs because of bitcoin miners driving the prices into the sky. And now, with the coronavirus destroying the economy and job market, people are being more frugal about their purchases than ever.

I know people who invested time and money in VR probably want this to remain an exclusive game to drive hardware sales and bring their hobby more into the mainstream, but it's simply not going to ever reach a sizable audience when it's being gatekept by the buy-in cost. Not everyone is even in a position where it's reasonable to throw 500+ dollars at the hardware/equipment necessary just to play one admittedly very nice looking 10~ish hour singleplayer campaign.

It is an absolutely terrible sell, unfortunately, no matter how good the game is. Not really sure what Valve was thinking or what the strategy here was, but it seems out of touch with the economic reality of most working class Americans, tbh.

Half-Life 2 was my first PC game. I grabbed a Nvidia 6600GT to throw in my shitty Pentium 4 bargain desktop, and it still ran fine at medium settings. $149 dollars and that was it, in 2004. Now for this title, Valve wants fans to shell out $1000 for an Index first... yeah, sorry, hard pass.

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