Valve Index usage grew more than Quest 2 in March on Steam.
Companies like Meta, Valve, & HTC don’t reveal hardware sales figures. The Steam Hardware Survey remains the most reliable indicator of PC VR’s adoption.
The survey is offered to a random sample of Steam’s userbase each month. If you choose to accept, it uploads your PC specifications along with SteamVR’s log of any headsets connected in the past month.
In March the percentage of SteamVR users using Valve Index increased from 14.43% to 15.09%. Since Quest 2 started appearing on the Hardware Survey, this has only happened once in September 2021. In August Index was launched in Australia and Quest 2 sales were paused for three weeks.
Still sold at $999 for the full kit, Index has now been on the market for almost three years. It still has best-in-class tracking and audio quality, but in recent years its 1600×1440 per eye resolution has been leapfrogged both on the high end by headsets like HTC’s Vive Pro 2 (2448×2448) and on the low end by Quest 2 (1832×1920).
In October Index overtook Oculus Rift S to become the second most actively used VR headset on Steam, a position it still holds.
In February Valve announced the intention to extend the Index lifespan by making replacement parts available through iFixit.
The overall percentage of Steam users with a VR headset stayed essentially the same, increasing ever so slightly from 2.12% to 2.13%.
Last month Valve revealed Steam’s monthly active userbase as 132 million, suggesting around 2.8 million SteamVR users in March.
