Beat Saber achieved a notable milestone on January 1, 2019, according to Steam analytics site SteamDB, which tracks data as reported by Valve’s Steam PC games store.
To ring in the new year, more than 4,000 players at the same time booted up Beat Saber on their PCs, according to the data collected by SteamDB. The player count outstrips the concurrent player count in other popular titles like Skyrim, which reported nearly 3,000 players with its VR debut on PC in April 2018. We first spotted the chart tweeted out by VR investor Tipatat Chennavasin.
The data of course doesn’t include Beat Saber players booting up the game on some 3 million PlayStation VR headsets, nor does it include those who bought the game from Facebook’s Oculus. So it’s not really possible to take this as a snapshot of the overall performance of Beat Saber across all platforms. It is disappointing similar data isn’t available via the Oculus Store for a fuller picture of the overall PC games market.
Beat Saber launched on PC first in 2018 and modding the game to accept songs with custom beat mapping remains a big draw even as developers work on a multiplayer version alongside other additions.
We are expecting Oculus Quest first in 2019 and big news next week at CES, but the upgrade paths for PC VR headset owners is still unclear. HTC, Valve, Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung and other companies might all have PC VR hardware upgrades in store and those could have a major impact on PC VR adoption — and concurrent players in VR — in 2019.
