Nearly 5 months after launch, Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 is the most used VR headset on Steam.
That is according to the February 2021 results for the Steam Hardware Survey. Valve finally started counting Quest 2 headsets in its own category at the beginning of January. Quest 2 jumped from 17.40% of total VR usage in January to 22.91% in February, overtaking the Oculus Rift S, which fell to 21.58%. Valve’s Index headset comes in at third with 16% and the original HTC Vive follows at 13.05%.
Last month represented the first time that the percentage of Steam users with a VR headset grew past 2% and that kept growing — albeit marginally — to 2.21% in this week’s results. Add up every Oculus headset and Facebook now accounts for 58% of the VR devices used on Steam, counting devices right the way back to the Oculus Rift DK2.
Quest 2 launched in October 2020 and is primarily a standalone VR headset that doesn’t require a connection to a PC to run. But, by plugging in the headset to a PC with a wired USB connection, or setting up a wireless link via Virtual Desktop (which can now be done inside the native Oculus Store app), the device can access SteamVR content. The headset’s $299 starting price and spec sheet that compares with even some of the more advanced (and much more expensive) PC VR headsets no doubt helped it secure a foothold this quickly.
As always, keep in mind that the Steam Hardware Survey is offered to a random sample of Steam’s userbase each month. If they accept, it uploads their PC specifications along with SteamVR’s log of any headsets connected in the past month. It isn’t quite a definitive indicator of the state of PC VR market share, then, but given that Facebook, HTC and Valve have never shared solid sales stats for their headsets, it’s the best we’ve got.
Without any major new PC VR headsets marked for release anytime soon, we’re likely to see Quest’s lead grow in the coming months.
