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Comment by Ajedi32 | Hacker News Reader

It's still a niche, but growing steadily. Here's a spreadsheet I'm maintaining with statistics from Steam's monthly hardware survey: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12GKZ3qsTZ7WuC_lj1-04...

As you can see, over the past 2 years we've gone from 0.36% of Steam users having a PC VR headset, to 0.89%.

We're also nearing the launch of the next generation of VR headsets. Both Vive and Oculus have products in development, and its rumored that Valve is working on a new headset as well. I expect we'll be seeing the launch of a few new headsets over the course of the next year.

So no, VR isn't dying on the vine; it's just taking longer to reach maturity than some may have expected.

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Nice resource! One thing worth keeping in mind: the Steam survey only sees a VR headset if the VR software stack is running while the survey is taken, and that requires the headset to be plugged in and powered up. So those figures likely underestimate the number of VR-equipped systems by some significant factor. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's 2 or 3.

Yeah, that little quirk is both a blessing and a curse, because while it does make it harder to judge the actual number of VR-equipped systems, it also makes the numbers more representative of _active_ VR users rather than just users who _have_ a headset but don't often use it.

If you're trying to judge the size of the market in absolute numbers, you also have to account for the fact that this survey only measures _Steam_ users. So Rift users who don't use Steam, and owners of non-PC VR headsets like PSVR aren't included.

> makes the numbers more representative of _active_ VR users rather than just users who _have_ a headset but don't often use it

YMMV. My Vive-equipped PC launches Steam on boot, because that lets it install updates quietly in the background as they come in. Otherwise, the first thing likely to happen when I try to launch something is a long wait for stuff to download.

The Vive on the other hand is only plugged in when I actually use it. It gets hot, and I don't particularly want it to burn electricity for no better purpose than to die a premature death.

So even as an active VR user, my Vive is only visible to Steam for a minor fraction of the time my PC is logged on.

It's not dying, but 0.89% seems awfully low tho...

Like I said; still a niche, but growing. Though to put that in perspective, that's still higher than the number of Steam users who run Linux (0.77%).

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