Courtesy Neil Barbour, Research Analyst at S&P Global, here's some potent, data rich slides on the state of the VR market for developers to chew on this Summer. As the top slide indicates, hardware sales have been steadily trending downward after a brief COVID bump. (Click to embiggenate.) I haven't regularly tracked VR sales in recent years as it became clear HMDs were a hardware niche.
However! That's only part of the story. Because those who do own and regularly use an AR/VR headset are super passionate about the form factor, on average spending nearly 6 hours per day using them and other devices, mostly for games:
I'm tempted to guess that most of them are in VRChat, Gorilla Tag, or other free to play social VR games most of the time.
Anyway, here's a look at VR users by age, gender, and income level:
That many VR users put themselves in the "Other" category, gender-wise, aligns with a survey Syrmor and I did of VRChat users in 2021. As a caveat, one VR developer I showed this slide to doubted female usage is that high -- for instance, he told me, this figure also reflects the many moms who buy their kid a Quest, and set it up under their own Facebook account. (More on this subject later!)
The heavy skew toward Gen Z and Gen Y is also notable -- even more notable is that the majority of VR users earn over $100,000 year.
Core takeaway to me is VR gamers are a small but passionate audience which shouldn't be ignored. Also, the very fact that it's a niche audience means they tend to be underserved. And from a VR developers' perspective, it's a much more targeted market to cater to -- a chance to stand out on a much smaller shelf, as opposed to being lost at sea amid the thousands of PC, mobile, and consoles games which come out every year.
These slides, by the way, are part of a much larger deck. For the rest and much more analysis, get in touch with Neil on LinkedIn.
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