Valve fans remain loyal: Valve Index still beats Quest 3 on SteamVR
Valve fans remain loyal: Valve Index still beats Quest 3 on SteamVR
The five-year-old Valve Index is still more popular on SteamVR than Quest 3, according to the latest SteamVR stats.
Nearly ten months after the launch of Meta Quest 3, Valve Index is still the second most used SteamVR headset:
Quest 2: 39.66 percent Valve Index: 16.10 percent Quest 3: 15.65 percent Quest 3, released in October 2023, took third place in January 2024 with a 14% share of SteamVR headset usage, but has only grown slightly since then. Six months later, Valve Index is still defending its position. An impressive feat! The headset celebrated its fifth birthday in June and is still sold by Valve (the Valve Index VR kit costs twice as much as Quest 3). No successor has been announced or hinted at by Valve.
In general, not much has happened with the SteamVR stats since we last wrote about them in May. Will the release of the PC adapter for Playstation VR 2 next week bring some change? We are curious to see how Sony's headset will fare in the SteamVR stats. The same goes for the budget headset Meta Quest 3S, which is expected to be released later this year.
SteamVR users as a percentage of the total Steam user base has dropped from 1.92 to 1.73 percent since April.
Nice to see. And at the same time sad to see such little action in the VR space. I really thought things were going to take off after Alyx. I'm just hoping Valve will keep Steam VR and keep improving it, so that is even better when the next XR wave happens.
I really just don't think the consumer desire is there at this point, and I don't think there's much to be done to counter that. Valve released a new Half Life game and still couldn't achieve critical mass. Look at all the billions Meta has poured into Quest and it's still mostly a Christmas present given by confused grandparents that gets used a few times a year.
In scripted demos and edited YouTube clips, they look like a blast, but the reality is just way too much work for too little reward for most people.
Anecdotally, I've owned a couple headsets over the past decade, buying all of them were impulse decisions that I regretted; I currently have my complete Index for sale for $400 on FBMP just hoping someone takes it off my hands at this point
I think there's enough desire, but the threshold is still too high. I have an Index, that I love, and I haven't used the thing in almost 2 years now because it's such a drag to set it up. Also, pretty much all games are standing up and most of the time when I want to play I want to sit down (racing/rally sims ftw) and I know I'm not alone. And taking the headset on and off can be a drag. You need to be able to quickly and effortlessly jump in and out, both physically and digitally. But things are moving in the right direction when it comes to all those things.
But then there's still also the catch 22 of content. AAA games is what could sell the platform, but very few devs want to spend an absolute shitload of money on something with such great uncertainty, financially. And the uncertainty has only gotten bigger the past couple of years.
What I don't get is why 3rd party studios don't use the Source engine more. Alyx
and Boneworksetc show that it is by far the best engine for VR fps.But we rather get janky Unity3D games that mostly suck.
The only real reason that I can think of is studios wanting to make cross platform games that work natively on the Quest as well, but there is literally no good VR fps that pulled off that feat. without compromising so much that the result didn't suck on both platforms.
As a programmer (though not in the games industry) I can inform you that the vast majority of sw companies operate by the "the fastest solution is the best solution" principle. If they have developers who already know Unity it's a pretty big expense to have everybody learn a new game engine, and the management would need to be convinced that using Source is going to lead to a corresponding increase in sold copies of their games.
I don't know. Could it be a licencing issue? Cost? Or just that they would have to learn a new engine just for a VR game that isn't as versatile as Unity? I don't know.
That’s one of the whole issues with VR adoption. Valve didn’t release a VR engine! I wish they released a VR engine and Alyx was only a simple tech demo. They inverted what was needed and adoption of VR has suffered.
I currently have a quest pro but I am so ready to upgrade to a steam only oled headset. The beyond sucked and everything else is just too damn expensive. Someone please bring out an affordable pancake lens oled headset that has great lenses and small form.
VR seems a bit weird right now. There's been a lot of tech development of things like the lenses but I think only small scaled production headsets with accordingly high prices use all the new stuff. And the Deckard will likely be something very enthusiast level / expensive too.
Also, do we know by now if the lacking features of the PSVR 2 adapter come down to the device itself or Steam VR simply not supporting them yet? I doubt we'll see a lot of sales with the lack of those features on the PC.
I'm not linking my Facebook account to my gaming.
Fuck that noise.
Quest is an economy headset and Index is a premium one. Different markets. The ancient rift s still has a huge number of owners because there is no economy headset as good as it, including all the Quests. If Meta made a headset with a display port instead of streaming blurry video to each eye over wifi, they'd get a lot bigger market share. But they only care about their standalone users, PC is secondary at best.
It’s not like I’m going to trade my depreciated yet top-tier headset for som ZB economy headset.
Index was fantastic so I'm not hugely surprised.
Honestly the Quest 2 was a great piece of kit when paired with a gaming PC. It would take a lot to make me upgrade.
Sucks I got my quest 1 before meta bought them up. Now it collects dust with barely 100hrs of use. Could use that $500 right about now.