Steam just saw the biggest increase in Oculus Quest 2 users since the headset launched over a year ago.
Over the weekend Valve posted an update to the Steam Hardware Survey, its monthly opt-in initiative that detects what types of hardware Steam users own. In January, Quest 2 (which is still identified as Oculus Quest 2 in the survey despite now being known as Meta Quest 2) accounted for a massive 46.02% of the VR headsets used on the platform. That’s an increase of 6.39% over last month.
It’s another sign of what looks to have been a very successful holiday period for Meta’s standalone headset, which can access PC VR content via either wired or wireless Link connections. Without any other major PC VR headset releases on the horizon, it seems very possible that Quest 2 will account for over half of the VR headsets used on the platform within the next few months. As it stands, Meta headsets already account for 67.27% of headsets used on Steam, pushing it just over two-thirds.
Quest 2’s gains saw most other headsets surrender ground this month. Valve’s own Index fell 1.43% to 14.36% of the overall share, whereas the now-discontinued Rift S and original HTC Vive headsets continued to decline. HTC’s Vive Pro 2 did see a growth of 0.07%, however, and the recently-released Pico Neo 3 saw some small growth too. In total, 2.14% of Steam users have now used a VR headset.
2022 holds a lot of exciting VR headset releases though, currently at least, none of them are dedicated PC devices. Project Cambria will be a more expensive standalone from Meta with refreshed specs and design that will almost certainly still be able to connect to PC, whilst we’ve got our fingers crossed that Sony’s PS5-based PSVR 2 will still make it out this year. It also remains to be seen if Apple’s long-rumored headset could have any sort of SteamVR connectivity, though there are now reports it could miss a 2022 launch too.
