Facebook’s Oculus Rift S is again the most used VR headset on Steam, after losing its position back in April.
Back in March, Valve fundamentally changed how the Hardware Survey collects VR headset data. Beforehand it simply scanned for connected USB devices, but that missed out on new headsets as well as devices not plugged in at the time. The new method scans your SteamVR logs from the past month too, so any SteamVR-compatible headset should be detected.
But Valve may have continued to make tweaks in April. Rift S dropped 5% while Quest increased 3% and ‘Other’ increased 2%. Some have suggested Valve may have been miscategorizing Quests as Rift S when connected wirelessly via 3rd party software.
Regardless of what caused the drop, Rift S jumped +1.22% this month. Roughly 1 in 4 VR headsets used on Steam in August were Rift S.
This was accompanied by a -1.57% drop in HTC Vive usage. The Vive, originally launched back in 2016, seemed to see a usage jump in the months following Half Life: Alyx. Some owners likely dusted off the cobwebs to jump into Valve’s flagship title, but by now they could have packed it away again or upgraded to a Valve Index.
Index saw the second-highest growth this month- it’s now the headset of choice for roughly 1 in 6 SteamVR users. This continues a consistent trend for Valve, further proving the demand for higher-end PC VR hardware is greater than previously assumed.
Throughout the year, evidence has been mounting of a new Oculus Quest. Sources told us this ‘Oculus Quest 2’ entered mass production in late July and features a new lens adjustment mechanism for IPD. It’s unclear where this would leave Rift S, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped its momentum quite yet.
