Facebook Beating Valve on Valve's Own Platform (But I Doubt Valve Cares)

Well this seems unexpected:

Nearly 5 months after launch, Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 is the most used VR headset on Steam.

That is according to the February 2021 results for the Steam Hardware Survey.

Valve finally started counting Quest 2 headsets in its own category at the beginning of January. Quest 2 jumped from 17.40% of total VR usage in January to 22.91% in February, overtaking the Oculus Rift S, which fell to 21.58%. Valve’s Index headset comes in at third with 16% and the original HTC Vive follows at 13.05%.

The Valve Index is the VR headset that came bundled with one of the most anticipated games of recent years: Half-Life: Alyx, also from Valve. And while it was seemingly designed as Valve's killer app to sell the Index, sales have been decent but not great: Roughly 2 million sold as of last December. (Compared to 10 million+ for Half-Life 2.) I was hoping Alyx's modding community would be the Index's killer app, but that doesn't seem to be the case either.

All that to one side, I doubt Valve cares that Facebook is beating Valve on its own platform:

"In the end [Valve makes] their money from game sales, not hardware sales," as VR gamer/designer Adeon Writer put it to me, after sending this tip my way. "Their headset is crazy expensive, but I've heard it said they intentionally didn't want to price out the competition -- they benefit from a VR war if they can sell the games. While many Rift and Quest users will use Oculus Home to play VRChat, it's because it's free. When it comes time to actually buy a game, they buy it on steam, where they know if they buy a non-Oculus headset in the future, they'll still be able to play it."

Or like a reader put it last year, Valve's approach to VR still seems more sustainable than Facebook, which is selling Oculus Quest 2 at a loss, and still managing to sell only 1 million or so its first quarter.

Comments

[seph]

Valve Index has been out of stock/backordered since launch. They have a supply problem, not a demand problem. No telling how many units the Index would have sold if it could've met demand.