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HTC Vive

Ever since HTC and Oculus launched their corresponding headsets earlier this year, people have wondered which visitor had shipped more than units and how the VR market place was evolving as a whole. The Vive took an early lead over the Rift, cheers to unexplained component shortages that took several months for the Facebook subsidiary to iron out. But both firms have been shipping on fourth dimension for months. Today, Oculus and HTC both hope to ship within a matter of days, not the weeks or months information technology took before this twelvemonth.

Unfortunately, that immediate aircraft promise may be partly because very few people are ownership into VR at all. Steam's Hardware Survey isn't perfect — in fact, it tends to regularly accept problems identifying video card makes and models correctly, months or even years after AMD and Nvidia launch new products. In VR, however, there are only a handful of SKUs that need to be tracked, and 1 of them is a headset Steam partnered with. The figures we come across here should be closer to accurate, and what they bear witness is quite concerning.

Steam gives united states of america ii pieces of information. First, the market split between the diverse headsets it tracks (HTC Vive 59.8%, Oculus Rift 30.22%, Oculus Rift DK2 9.98%). Given that the vast majority of gamers of all types have Steam, this suggests the HTC Vive has outsold the Rift roughly 2:1, with a adequately steady group of DK2 owners.

What's more than troubling is the way the VR market hasn't grown over the past two months. Back in September, information from Steam showed just 0.xviii% of Steam users as owning a Vive headset, with 0.10% of those users owning an Oculus Rift, TMCNet reported. These figures showed the Vive as having added just 0.3% of Steam users across July and August (Oculus added 0.i% over the same time period).

HTC-Vive-Market-Share

Since all Steam's data is reported for the trailing month, we're at present seeing September data in October. The results show a 0.1% uptick for the Vive and a 0.1% downtick for Oculus. Since it'due south not clear how often Valve refreshes its data set, it's possible this means some Oculus users oasis't been logging into Steam or have disconnected their headsets. Even if nosotros presume the 0.01% downturn is an artifact of how Valve measures its data — and I remember that's a reasonable assumption — there's no growth for Oculus in these figures at all. Meanwhile, HTC has just added 0.01% of market share beyond all of August and September.

These are not the figures that the manufacture wants to see, but they aren't necessarily a sign of doom, either. At $600 to $800, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are extremely expensive platforms with currently express utility and no proven long-term staying power. Given that the PC market continues to collapse (we're up to viii directly quarters of decline at present, the longest in history), PCs clearly don't have as much staying power equally they used to. Consumers are used to buying entire systems for $400 to $500, while VR costs significantly more than that for but the peripherals. If you need a reckoner that can run VR well, that'southward at to the lowest degree $500 and possibly over $900. The buy-in costs are huge, and they're definitely impacting the total market.

There's every reason to think we will run across an uptick effectually Christmas and a possible spring from Oculus Touch availability. Buyers interested in VR may well have held off until the Oculus Affect controllers were ready, since this will offer the best apples-to-apples comparing against the HTC Vive. And so I don't call up anyone should panic only yet. Merely by the aforementioned token, some of the more overheated projections for VR's short-term performance may accept been wrong as well. Certainly there's not much sign gamers are flocking to the hardware. Given the electric current expense of getting into the market, most gamers are probably watching to see what the 2d-generation hardware will look like.

What I'yard personally hoping is that we see a adequately rapid iteration cycle, with previous-generation hardware dropping to lower toll points without compromising the initial experience. AMD's reveal of a $500 VR-capable machine last week was a step in the right direction. But the faster Oculus, HTC, and other companies can push the buy-in cost of VR to $200 to $300 equally opposed to $600+, the amend off the market will exist.