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HTC Vive

Ever since HTC and Oculus launched their respective headsets before this year, people have wondered which visitor had shipped more units and how the VR market was evolving as a whole. The Vive took an early lead over the Rift, thanks to unexplained component shortages that took several months for the Facebook subsidiary to iron out. Merely both firms have been shipping on time for months. Today, Oculus and HTC both hope to ship within a thing of days, not the weeks or months it took earlier this year.

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

Steam gives us two pieces of information. First, the marketplace separate between the various headsets it tracks (HTC Vive 59.8%, Oculus Rift 30.22%, Oculus Rift DK2 nine.98%). Given that the vast majority of gamers of all types have Steam, this suggests the HTC Vive has outsold the Rift roughly ii: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. Dorsum in September, information from Steam showed just 0.18% 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.three% of Steam users across July and Baronial (Oculus added 0.1% over the same time menstruation).

HTC-Vive-Market-Share

Since all Steam'due south information is reported for the trailing calendar month, we're now seeing September data in Oct. The results bear witness a 0.1% uptick for the Vive and a 0.i% downtick for Oculus. Since it's not articulate how often Valve refreshes its information set, information technology'south possible this means some Oculus users haven't been logging into Steam or take disconnected their headsets. Even if we assume the 0.01% downturn is an artifact of how Valve measures its information — and I think that's a reasonable assumption — there's no growth for Oculus in these figures at all. Meanwhile, HTC has only added 0.01% of market place share beyond all of Baronial and September.

These are non the figures that the industry 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 (nosotros're up to eight straight quarters of decline now, the longest in history), PCs clearly don't accept as much staying ability as they used to. Consumers are used to buying entire systems for $400 to $500, while VR costs significantly more than than that for simply the peripherals. If you need a computer that can run VR well, that's at least $500 and possibly over $900. The purchase-in costs are huge, and they're definitely impacting the total market.

There's every reason to retrieve nosotros will see an uptick effectually Christmas and a possible jump from Oculus Touch availability. Buyers interested in VR may well have held off until the Oculus Touch controllers were ready, since this volition offering the best apples-to-apples comparison confronting the HTC Vive. Then I don't recollect anyone should panic merely yet. But by the aforementioned token, some of the more overheated projections for VR'due south brusk-term operation may take been wrong as well. Certainly there's non much sign gamers are flocking to the hardware. Given the current expense of getting into the marketplace, nigh gamers are probably watching to see what the second-generation hardware will look like.

What I'grand personally hoping is that we see a adequately rapid iteration cycle, with previous-generation hardware dropping to lower price points without compromising the initial feel. AMD's reveal of a $500 VR-capable machine last week was a step in the right direction. Only the faster Oculus, HTC, and other companies tin can push the purchase-in cost of VR to $200 to $300 as opposed to $600+, the better off the market volition be.