A tweet from Valve writer and VR enthusiast Chet Faliszek brought with it some exciting news for the burgeoning virtual reality industry.
While 185 are on sale, there are now over 400 VR applications on Steam! https://t.co/WYgKFp9CD5
— Chet Faliszek (@chetfaliszek) July 29, 2016
That’s right, according to Faliszek there are now over 400 “VR applications” for users with the appropriate hardware to enjoy on Steam. A quick check on the Steam search page itself confirms this estimation and locks the official number of VR games and experiences currently available on Steam at 418. This means that the amount of VR content on the platform has effectively doubled since May.
VR headsets are miracles of product design and stand as testaments to the massive leap in sophistication that consumer electronics components have taken this past decade. As cool as they are, however, VR headsets still need a healthy diet of compelling content in order to stay viable. What’s more, they need experiences interesting enough to justify their price points, which are roughly double that of the leading video game consoles.
418 VR experiences may seem like more than enough content to entice hands towards wallets — especially when you consider that a console like the NES only had 23 games in the entire first year of its American release — but numbers aren’t everything. These VR apps could be anything from a fully-fledged, polished gaming revelation like Raw Data, or it could be a simple picture viewer or physics demo. Quantity does not equal quality because, as any developer will tell you, one Super Mario Brothers is worth more than an entire library of middling software.
VR in general is still waiting for a small red plumber of its own to whisk it into the mainstream, but while we wait it is still encouraging to see so many talented developers putting so much content into the ecosystem.
