Quest 2 quickly rose to become the most-used VR headset on Steam, but last month it crossed a new milestone as the majority of headsets used on the platform.

Quest 2’s aggressive price point and ability to be used as both a standalone and PC VR headset propelled it to become the most-used VR headset on Steam back in February 2021, just four months after its launch.

From there it has only continued to grow, and now the latest data from Valve’s Steam Survey shows that Quest 2 now makes up the majority of headsets on the platform at 50.32% (+1.3%).

Of course Quest 2 isn’t the only Meta headset used on Steam. Quest 2, Quest 1, Rift S, and Rift collectively grew slightly in the last month to 67.16% (+0.48%), with the vendor’s overall gains otherwise reduced by the Rift S dropping to 9.88% (−0.72%). That sees Meta continuing to hold more than two thirds of the VR headsets on Steam.

Though Quest 2 has definitely grown quickly, the headset’s recent price increase will probably reduce its growth rate compared to what we’ve seen so far.

While the portion of individual headsets used on Steam appears to be correct in the latest round of data from Valve, the total portion of Steam users using VR headsets has been fluctuating wildly in the last few months, apparently erroneously. We’ve reached out to Valve on multiple occasions for comment on the issue but have yet to receive a response.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Andrew Jakobs

    Didn’t I read over at Mixed-VR that a main designer of Meta has gone to work for Pico?

    • Thud

      I gonna search for that but can you provide a link in calse I’m unsuccessful seaching? Nothing could make me happier than a solid competitor for META (Well, Pico saying they are going to release the next gen headset in the US would be close).

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Answers with links or domain names are now send into an eternal review loop from which they never reappear, but the (English version of the) site is mixed-news, the article is called “Key Meta engineer is now building a new XR team for Pico” and the engineer is Jian Zhang, a graphics engine development industry veteran.

    • MeowMix

      It was the co-creator of ‘Application SpaceWarp’ (not to be confused with ASW) that jumped ship to Pico; I forget his name, but there was only 2 of them in the AppSW dev video.
      The Mixed-XR site made it seem like the guy was a big wig engineer at Meta, but he was probably more of a middle level graphics guy. Still a lose for Meta overall

      • Jonathan Winters III

        i love tuna, i love liver, give me some of that for dinner (or something like that).

  • Carnel

    Quest 2 is gonna stay at the top for a while, no other consumer headset at least in the US seems to be able to match the price point, even with the recent hike up to $399.

    • Arno van Wingerde

      Well, let’s see what the Sony PSVR2 will cost…

  • Sven Viking

    The headset proportion figures continue to look sane so I expect they’re fine, but with the total active VR users percentage still going crazy and no comment from Valve it becomes increasingly difficult to feel sure.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      The real bad thing is that the Steam survey data, despite all its flaws, was almost the only somewhat usable data we got for the development of the market, and it was possible to derive certain trends like the yearly cycle of many new Quest users during the holiday season, followed by many of them losing interest again after a few months.

      If the “Monthly Active VR Users” survey number becomes unusable, and Valve never explains why this is happening, we lose our only (somewhat) consistent way to determine the growth of VR. And we are already starved of hard data.

      • ViRGiN

        the only valuable data was always the one coming from in-game player counts. you can not opt out of publishing this data; and realistically very few play games offline to not appear on the count. additionally, most games are vr exclusive; games that also work on flat screen that have any real user numbers could be counted on one hand, like flight simulator, but those are extreme niche. it is impossible to estimate how many vr users there are in vrchat, but overall, the concurrent connected user count basically did not grow, it’s constantly going down for months; it just saw a slight uptick of about 1000 extra users in july likely to steamvr fest, where people jumped in to try crappy demos for 5 minutes.
        and of course, steamvr has basically a monopoly among pcvr users; it’s not like there is an insane growth of people using oculus store for playing pcvr.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          The data from VRLFG (VR Looking For Group) is indeed quite interesting, esp. as a second source, as the curve in many ways mirrors the Steam survey data, with the same yearly holiday season peaks and following cool down and September slump. The problem is that is only gives average active users at any point time, you need another data source to derive absolute numbers.

          Steam regularly publishes the number of monthly active Steam users, 132mn in 2021, so it was easy to derive the absolute number of monthly active SteamVR users (~ 2.4mn) from their percentage. We can also combine that number with the numbers from VRLFG to get to an average monthly VR usage time per user (~ 5.5h), with a lot of added error, as VRLFG only covers a specific part of VR usage and not exactly the same user base.

          Another data source is monthly new ratings of apps on the Quest store, also showing the yearly holiday cycle, and allowing some conclusions of how many of the sold Quest 2 are in active use after three, six or twelve months. But again those are all relative to an unknown base, with most Quest 2 sales numbers being rumors and estimates. With Meta as the main player releasing only the occasional aggregates for software sales and none for hardware, we are forced to combine lots of sources to get to somewhat reliable estimates instead of just wild guesses, and losing any of these sources will be problematic.

          • ViRGiN

            no, you don’t need any more data than that. if there are more vr users – you will see them while using vr.
            no need to get desperate thinking of where all these thousands of new users are. they simply don’t exist.
            pcvr is trash, and pcvr is dead.

          • TBH, it never really took-off to begin with.
            I kinda/sorta wish it did, just for the sake of spreading the word about VR.
            But unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Quest 2 has now taken over that role.

  • XRC

    It’s coming full circle, originally Oculus was to build hardware whilst Valve operated digital storefront….

    • Ryan

      True! Funny how things work out. Now it makes sense why Oculus increased their prices.

      • XRC

        You can lose money quickly if your subsidized headsets (Meta)are enabling competitors platform (Steam) to take 30% cut of all software purchased by your users. Revenue from user data doesn’t backfill this loss.

        • Sandeman21

          “Revenue from user data doesn’t backfill this loss?”

          There is no basis to support there is such revenue afaik. It is just an assumption based on the business practices of the company on some of its other products.

  • Anonymous

    Please don’t fucking call Pico a competitor. It is a Chinese company, and by law must open backdoors for domestic censorship or future spy activities against overseas users. Not to mention all the revenue tax money gets funneled into the Liberation Army so they can kill more domestic dissidents or potentially others in the free world, if war breaks out.

    I will happily root for any other competing headset from any other country that isn’t China. If you care about basic human rights and your rights, you should too. Hate against FB is not a valid reason to support an evil country.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Actually it is the US that requires US companies to hand over data from non-US citizens, even if that data is stored not in the US, but the home countries of these people to prevent exactly that. In contrast Pico/TikTok has handed over all the data management for US users to Oracle, so even if the Chinese government would want to force Pico/TikTok to hand over data or build in backdoors, they couldn’t.

      This was done explicitly to counter these arguments that are basically asking for the boycott of anything Chinese, because apparently everything any Chinese company or farmer or whatever touches will be leaked directly to the government, which will then inevitably use the heart rate data from your cheap fitness tracker for genocide. Because it was always obvious that reason would never stop such arguments, Pico/TikTok went ahead and made it technically IMPOSSIBLE for them to secretly leak data. Not that this would stop those that will gladly buy all the cheap goods from China at their local Walmart, but then tell others that they mustn’t.

      • JakeDunnegan

        “In contrast Pico/TikTok has handed over all the data management for US users to Oracle” – got a link for that? This is the first I’ve heard that Tiktok isn’t anymore than a tool of the CCP, used by stupid people.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          No link posting allowed, but simply googling TikTok and Oracle will give you plenty of links. The data move has been in the works for a long time with other companies like Microsoft and even selling the whole international part of TikTok to a US company being options.

          The final deal was announced on June 17th, following some new concerns when Chinese TikTok software engineers turned out to have access to live US user data. Quote from article on Quartz called “Oracle finally won TikTok’s US data storage business”:

          Two years ago, the Trump administration engineered a deal for Oracle to store all of TikTok’s US data, citing fears the Chinese-owned app would help Beijing spy on Americans. Oracle set out to win the TikTok data storage contract, leveraging US-China antagonism and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s personal relationship with Trump to inject new life into its flagging data storage business.

          Now, thanks to a new TikTok data privacy scandal, Oracle has finally won TikTok’s business.

          TikTok announced June 17 that it had “changed the default storage location of US user data” and “100% of US user traffic is being routed to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.” The announcement coincided with a BuzzFeed investigation that revealed TikTok employees in China controlled and routinely accessed private data from US TikTok users between September 2021 and January 2022.

          The whole article is worth reading, a lot of it is about political pressure and favoritism, showing a very uncomfortable level of double standards.

          • JakeDunnegan

            So, as of this point, we have no way of knowing just how much TiTok is storing. Considering I work in government contracting, I know just how long it takes from “contract win” to “something actually happening” to “okay, now it’s actually in production.”

            Mistrust of Chinese sources is not exactly crazy-talk.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Mistrust of Chinese sources is indeed not exactly crazy-talk, and the willingness of their government to spy on others, bend the law and manipulate is well established. And since they are pretty good at that and have driven a hard nationalistic popularism for a decade, they actually have support by a lot of the population, so being cautious is quite reasonable.

            But there needs to be a sort of realistic perspective. The CCP has only been able to keep its reign by generating a significant GDP increase for decades, which has lifted large parts of a very poor population out of poverty, and they did that by basically switching their economy to turbo-capitalism. The only way it can stay in power is to keep their people happy or at least compliant with a continued increase in general wealth, and for that they depend on exports and the good will of other countries, as their internal economy cannot carry the necessary growth alone.

            This automatically limits how bad China can behave, and while they try to keep a tight check esp. on social networks like TikTok, they are fully aware that these companies will have to go out of their way to proof that they aren’t mishandling esp. US citizens data. So despite all the valid concerns, US TikTok users can be pretty sure that their personal data will be much safer than Facebook users ever could be. Another quote from the article is about Oracle getting oversight over what TikTok actually does with the data, something that Facebook pretty much tries to avoid telling Congress despite having been ordered too.

            The company also said it hired Oracle to “develop data management protocols that Oracle will audit and manage to give users even more peace of mind.”

          • JakeDunnegan

            I’m curious why you left off the key point of that article, in its last sentence: “BuzzFeed, however, reports that ByteDance employees in Beijing will still have access to public data about US users’ videos, comments, and bios, allowing them to draw inferences about Americans’ interests and politics.”

            Who cares if the data is stored with Oracle if the CCP is still spying on American citizens?

            I don’t disagree with your comments about China needing to keep their people happy, and being dependent on exports.

            However, Americans have zero reason to trust anything related to China. I don’t blame China for looking out for their own interests, and they do it aggressively. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it, and we certainly shouldn’t trust China – despite their need to do business with us.

            Your quote above about giving users more peace of mind? That’s a rote statement and pure propaganda – and more importantly, it was followed by the quote I stated above which directly (and rightly) contradicts it.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            I actually mentioned that “TikTok software engineers turned out to have access to live US user data” in my own description and intentionally quoted the start of the article up to the sentence “The announcement coincided with a BuzzFeed investigation that revealed TikTok employees in China controlled and routinely accessed private data from US TikTok users between September 2021 and January 2022.”, so I hardly left out “the key point of the article”.

            And of course they will have access to public data. You will have access to the public data. It is sort of a bizarre idea that TikTok shouldn’t have any access to TikTok data, somehow they have to do their jobs, anything else would be selling the social network to Oracle. Basically they now put all the data in a black box that is run by Oracle, can still put new functions inside the box that will run on the data and get results back from Oracle, like what things are trending, how many people clicked on videos etc. They will not get private information from profiles etc.

            I don’t expect anybody to use TikTok if they don’t want to anymore than using Facebook or others. My problem is the extreme level of double standards, where everything Chinese is automatically identified as a spying tool for the CCP. Many claims were made, whole Chinese companies were shut out of the US market, without a single piece of actual evidence ever presented, while US companies get away with repeatedly getting caught selling user data.

            I don’t trust the CCP either, but it is bananas to demand that a Chinese social network should somehow be prohibited from accessing any data, when 100% of running a social network is processing data. Basically there is a demand that TikTok has to prove they are innocent first, and the only accepted proof seems to be TikTok actually shutting down. You don’t trust them, fine. But if you judge different companies for their data protections, the same rules have to apply for all, including Facebook, not TikTok is guilty by default simply due to being a company from a country with a government that isn’t trustworthy. Because that is something they cannot change, meaning you aren’t even looking for proof, you just want to boycott them no matter what.

          • JakeDunnegan

            “My problem is the extreme level of double standards, where everything Chinese is automatically identified as a spying tool for the CCP. Many claims were made, whole Chinese companies were shut out of the US market, without a single piece of actual evidence ever presented, while US companies get away with repeatedly getting caught selling user data.”

            Of course there are double standards! China does things that are good for China and the US has its own interests as well.

            So, of course, the US is not going to appreciate the spying that China does, as China has a VERY recent, and even current, history of screwing American companies over (to the tune of $600 BILLION (!!!) a year!).

            China has unfair competition, since every major company in China is owned by the Chinese government. (Go look at Wikipedia’s list of largest companies in the world). They spy on the US, they steal data (and it goes beyond publicly available data btw – go click on the Buzzfeed article mentioned in your article). Additionally, TikTok is a two-way street. China uses it to influence political and social opinions to its 1B users, yet, the app itself is banned in China and the social networks used there are limited and controlled by the government.

            Why?

            Additionally, China has a iron-fisted control of their internet and the access the Chinese user base has on basically everything.

            So, why exactly, should the US be allowing a disinformation tool and personal data gathering device to the Chinese, whilst no such capabilities exist for the US to do and gather the same from China?

            And yes, I would most certainly judge the use that American companies put to data (I’m not a fan, and the likes of Facebook, Google, and others have essentially made trillions on the data they’ve resold) – but I don’t have to worry about Facebook F-35s and Google battleships showing up on US shores, either.

            And no, I, nor my kids, use Tiktok. ;)

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            I’m not denying anything you are referring to, but my perspective is a little bit different. The following isn’t intended as whataboutism, so nothing the US did wrong justifies the behavior of China, it is more about why I don’t easily accept a perspective of China as generally evil, with the US being the innocent one that has to protect itself from that evil.

            I’m European, and a lot of the things like the spying and the screwing over applies to the US to, which were caught spying on European heads of states, extremely widespread network surveillance and siphoning EU citizen data, and all that despite the targeted countries being considered allies and the US having signed treaties that explicitly prohibited what they actually did. Getting caught the US still refused to change their methods, which is why every US-EU agreement on data exchange has been stopped by the European High court, because the US always tries to introduce loop holes so they can still ignore the treaties and keep spying.

            And large US companies were willing to take billions in subsidies, but then used specific US tax loop holes to avoid ever having to pay taxes on EU earnings in the EU, instead paying much lower taxes on them in the US. We also were pretty shocked when the US elected Trump who basically went on a rampage for international treaties, putting the US in the camp of very unreliable partners absolutely willing to bully their way for their own benefit, no matter how much damage it causes for others. And even if the relationships are somewhat normalized right now, there is absolutely no guarantee that the next elections will not reverse them again.

            EU citizens do not trust China and are very aware of their unfair business tactics. We are also very aware of the rather unfair advantages the industrial countries have, partly going back to colonial times, but also still introduced into lots of contracts with developing countries, where the money is required to be spend on goods of the richer country. So many countries have some very justified reasons to be more protectionistic, with China clearly overdoing it.

            EU citizens do not really trust the US either anymore, though obviously still trust the US a lot more than China. But that means that it is somewhat bizarre when Americans finger point at China, blissfully ignoring that heap of skeletons in their own closet, and just assuming they somehow have the moral higher ground by default.

            TikTok went out of their way to ensure that US citizen data is safe from being leaked to the CCP, and they are paying a very high price for that, from which US companies close to the US government will benefit. And that without there ever being any prove of spying going on that could be considered a legal precedent. They not only have no direct access to the data, all their indirect access will also be monitored. And yet you simply label them as a “disinformation tool and personal data gathering device to the Chinese”, when it has to be obvious that pretty much any other social network is worse. You also never specify what exactly you want them to do more to make the data safer, you just want them to go away.

            I agree with pretty much everything you say about how China handles their own citizens, minorities, about censorship, manipulation, surveillance etc., and I really hope that the Chinese people will rid themselves of the CCP rather sooner than later. But I acknowledge that the CCP isn’t all of China, and despite their attempts to keep everything under check, their actual level of control is much smaller outside of their country. Which for me means that for a Chinese company that actively separates there national and international business and provides ample evidence of data protection verifiable by trusted sources, it is not okay to simply ignore all that and deny them any chance by just making blatant claims about them being only regime puppets. And, again from a European perspective, this is particularly ridiculous coming from the US, which has demonstrated absolutely no respect for the data of any non-US citizens over and over again, and even written that disrespect into their laws.

          • JakeDunnegan

            I won’t get into the history of colonialism, as that’s extremely far off-topic. But, it’s rich hearing it from Europeans, I’ll say that much. I will also add that no country has clean hands in that regard, including China (or especially China, if you go back through …forget centuries, we can go back millennia).

            Moving on – two wrongs don’t make a right. If Europe chooses not to trust the US or China, I don’t blame them. I’ll repeat, every country has the right to push for their own interests.

            However, when it comes to Europe, I would hope that shared history, to say nothing of the blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and trillions in defense budgets – including many billions in the current day (Ukraine) would highlight the bonds of friendship between the US and Europe, particularly and in contrast with the current “friendship” between China and Russia.

            Again, I don’t want to go diving too deep into politics, but, the US has every right to oppose a single (or EVERY) Chinese app that would be posted for sale in the US, particularly considering the reverse treatment hasn’t been remotely equal between the two countries. China steals technology and revenue constantly from the US and refuses access to American companies in Chinese markets (or internet).

            Full-stop.

            That, in and of itself, is plenty enough reason for the US to oppose TikTok or any other app, VR device or anything else. And yes, if China continues these policies, they will lose access to the US market. The recent CHIPS bill means that the US will be building more and more of our own chips and devices, and yes, China will suffer.

            I don’t love the idea, again, nothing personal with the average Chinese citizen, but perhaps the CCP will change their behavior.

            I’m not going to deep dive into China’s current spying practices, since the Buzzfeed article already explains that, and you ignored it.

    • g s

      The redscare is real, US companies have Billionaire contracts with the Pentagon, they got caught so many times misusing our data, like Zuckerberg illegally listening to your microphones to sell you shit or Jeff Bezos giving camera records from your house to the police yet looks like the double standards will never end, it’s always US/western companies the good guys trying to save the world against the red terrible villain trying to conquer the world

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Bullshit. It isn’t any different as Meta has to do for the US government or Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.
      And the US is just as evil as China, bullying other countries, spying on its own allies, interfering in politics of other countries, invading countries under false pretences, taking other countries citizens and imprisoning them in illegal sites, and the list goes on. You think the US is ‘the land of the free’, but that’s just a big illusion.

      • brandon9271

        The US isn’t currently putting muslims in concentration camps.. so there’s that at least.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          taking other countries citizens and imprisoning them in illegal sites,

          is most likely a reference to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, which despite lots of announcements and scandals still hasn’t been closed after almost 20 years, with a mainly muslim population and infamous for incarcerating them without ever putting them on trial as the US constitution would demand, with extremely shady legal justifications for doing so. The two situations you both are referring to are obviously different, but your “there’s that at least” isn’t really there.

          I am very careful to compare anything to concentration camps or in general try to weight the atrocities one country committed or still commits against those of others. It is usually better to stick to specific events and proceedings reported by reliable sources instead of trying to paint a broad picture of one side being good and the other being evil. All countries consist of lots of people with lots of opinions doing very different things, so any attempt to boil down hundreds of millions into a few adjectives is bound to be a gross oversimplification and rather unhelpful.

          • brandon9271

            so.. Uyghur Muslim concentration camps in China are OK because the US put terror suspects in prison? Look, I agree that those folks who’ve been arrested deserve a fair trial but you can’t just hand-wave what China is doing with, “but Guantanamo…”

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Hm, obviously you deleted your other response before I could answer.

            China has done some truly heinous shit. Saying “the USA is just as evil as China” is complete bullshit

            As I said, trying to sum down whole countries to simple adjectives or single acts isn’t helpful, nor is comparing atrocities, which is why I don’t do it and why I never claimed and never would claim what you implied or consider “complete bullshit”.

            My whole argument is “Please don’t paint the world in black and white, even if a detailed examination is more work. The real world is grey in all shades of color”.

          • brandon9271

            The thing is, you responded to something when I wasn’t even talking to you. Someone else said, “the USA is just as evil as China” and did exactly what you said not do which is “comparing atrocities” and “sum down whole country” and “paint a broad picture.” So I pointed out how that wasn’t a particularly fair comparison. I suppose if you have a bias against the USA then it’s all fair game comparing apples and oranges.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            I agree that the comparison isn’t particularly fair. I do not agree with Andrew Jakobs painting a simplified picture of the US in reaction to others painting a simplified picture of China. And my whole point is that it is never fair game comparing apples and oranges.

          • ViRGiN

            regardless of athrocities commited by anyone, most sane people/nations will “prefer” to be under USA boots, than china or russia for example.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Why are those the options instead of being under nobody’s boot?

          • Nepenthe

            Why are those the options? Reality (vs. utopia) probably.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            If you think that this is the only possible reality, my wild guess is you are either American, Chinese or Russian.

          • Nepenthe

            I’ll take a wild guess and say you think the EU superstate is up on some pedestal of utopian goodness.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Wrong guess.

          • Of course it is, you brainwashed Liberal imbecile ….
            Everything you & the rest of the world enjoy as being
            “creations of Humanity” was invented in Europe.
            EVERYTHING.

          • ViRGiN

            because that’s how the world works now, and nations do pick sides.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            But it’s exactly the same in regard to bias. A lot of people have a bias against China, so everything China does is evil, but in the mean time think the US are the good guys where in fact they are certainly not ‘the good guys’. I’m not saying everything is OK in China, far from it, but let’s not forget it’s also a big different (ancient) culture. Yep, the Uyghur is a black spot on China, and hopefully something will be done about it, but ofcourse we don’t get all the actual facts about that situation, we all know how the media twists and turns a lot of things, especially if one government has a beef with the other (yes, media is very much controlled/influenced by people in governments).

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            There are many options between being “the good guys” and “certainly not ‘the good guys'”, and a lot of dimensions on which to actually measure that, so even using that binary terminology will inevitable lead to misunderstandings, as will any form of whataboutism. Best to avoid it.

          • ViRGiN

            hey, how many rubles per post are you getting?

          • Arno van Wingerde

            Well… there is one obvious difference between the Uyghur camps and Guantanamo Bay: about 1 million versus 35 prisoners … or China has really high levels of terrorism! So I think that calling the US “just as bad as China”, like Andrew did, is simply not correct.
            It sure does have its shady sides and things seem to be getting worse, but compared to China it does better in many ways.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            I’m not agreeing with Andrew at all, but I’m also not agreeing with a discussion on Pico/TikTok’s actually positive privacy policy inevitable being countered by the very unrelated “but what about the suppression of the Uyghurs”. Which is a very complex subject in itself, and one of the many dimensions China or any other country can and will be evaluated by, never resulting in a simple good/evil dichotomy.

    • Engorged

      Completely agree, no one should ever buy the Pico headset if they care about privacy at all. People are brainwashed to hate Meta so much they are willing to support tyranical government instead.

    • Rogue Transfer

      It turns out that the Quest 2, Pico and PSVR headsets are all manufactured by the same Chinese company: Goertek. As such, the revenue from the Quest 2 and others also gets funnelled to support the China government. So, by buying a Quest 2, you are funding the Chinese government through the manufacturing revenue in a Chinese company.

      As we all know, nearly everything electronic is made in China, so your argument about revenue from one company over another is mostly moot. Meta(Facebook) are supporting the Chinese government by using China as their manufacturer. With Pico, their hardware revenue also goes to the Chinese government, just the same, but you can choose to only buy software from a non-China based store(e.g. use Pico headsets as PCVR only or apks from itch io and other sources).

  • ViRGiN

    Meta is winning without even playing lol

    • Absolutely! lol
      It kills me to hear all this bullspit about garbage like Take5,Lynx R-1,
      Pico Neo Goodo Whizzo-Bango 4 1/2, etc, being “Q2 competitors”….
      THERE ARE NO QUEST 2 COMPETITORS!!
      Nor will there ever be: Quest 2 is very high quality at a very low price.
      All the coming AIOs like AppleVR & Deckard are very high quality, as well.
      But they won’t be at a very low price ….
      Nobody will ever come in at the quality/price ratio that Quest 2 has.
      NOBODY. EVER.
      Why people can’t just get that through their thick skulls is maddening.
      The nonsense Facebook phony “hatred” is clouding their judgement.

      • David Wilhelm

        For the love of god shut up

      • JakeDunnegan

        Well, you know what they say, “never say never”. I’m glad Zuck blew money to sell the headset at a discount. And, they’re getting a lot more aggressive on selling apps in their store (and pushing sales *gasp*) which they had essentially ignored for most of the platform’s life.

        I’ve been kind of shocked to see how many sales of some of their top end apps have seen over the same app in the Steam store. I never thought I’d see that.

        However, conversely, look at how sharp Valve is – they’ve been doing the heavy lifting in keeping the Meta sets compatible with its platform, and it’s paid off.

        Ultimately, Valve having a viable VR store is GOOD for the consumer. Competition means innovation and it means cheaper prices for the end user. The more sets that can use Valve’s store, the better off VR users will be. It will also continue to push Meta to keep their sets competitive and priced lower. Right now, when given the choice, users are smarter (if they have the hardware) to buy apps in the Valve store, in case they want to switch set vendor in the future, they don’t lose all their apps.

        What this article really highlights – is that the CONSUMER is the one who wins with lower prices across the board, and more choices in where to purchase their apps.

        • ViRGiN

          >Competition means innovation
          WHAT KIND OF COMPETITION, dude, stop worshipping valve

          • JakeDunnegan

            Heh. I’m a consumer. I like Valve when it benefits me, and I like GoG and Epic too – when they benefit me.

            It’s just common sense to buy an app on a store that you can then use with another hardware vendor – as opposed to being locked into an environment where the vendor can pick their price.

            You know, like Apple.

            It’s one of the many reasons why people go with Android as opposed to Apple phones – 80% of cell phones sold are on Android, as opposed to Apple, in part, thanks to Apple’s closed environment.

            Also, if I “worshipped” Valve, I’d have the Valve headset – and I do not. Never have. I have the Rift, Rift S, and two Quest 2s.

            Being a smart consumer, I can use the Quest 2 on my PC or stand-alone. I’ve avoided purchasing most of my apps on the Quest store b/c of the aforementioned lack of being consumer friendly – both the Facebook account nonsense, as well as habitually pricing apps at full price, and of course, the closed environment.

          • ViRGiN

            > You know, like Apple.
            you mean like the most valuable tech company in the world? billion of people regret purchasing app store software?

            it was clear for years that meta is leading the way. there isn’t ‘another hardware vendor’. plus you can use rift store to play games even on an index. your argument makes no sense, other than to strengthen already huge monopoly of steam.

            the ‘open environment’ of steam only contributes to it’s garbage offerings. too much shovelware. illusion of choice.

          • Carnel

            this guy says to stop worshipping valve while fucking praising anything that Meta does lmfao

      • kool

        Quite the circle jerk y’all got going on there. Meta has done very well in the VR market. I think meta will create their own competition when they release their version of the metaverse. It’ll be walled garden and there will be an open source metaverse that uses all those headsets you named. I think people hate meta because of privacy, ads and facebook the quest is actually pretty dope.

  • JT

    I don’t like quest 2 as a PCVR headset. The compressed image was giving me motion sickness. Also, it was very problematic. I have gone back to the Rift S.

    • ViRGiN

      this comment gave me motion sickness

      • JT

        That is because you are an ass and criticize everyone. How is mom’s basement these days? The Rift S is a very good headset. It is very comfortable and runs butter smooth even 150 plus percent super sampling.

        • ViRGiN

          if you enjoy dead platforms, power to you.
          zx spectrum is still going strong.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        It’s okay to get motion sick, but you could at least try not to barf all over the forum.

  • Ben Lang

    Please stop with the aggressive use of bolding in your comments.

    • alxslr

      +100

  • Blinkin73

    There is one announcement I think that would make everyone freak out about VR. I doubt it will happen, but it never hurts to dream. An announcement from Sony that the PSVR2 will be compatible with PCVR. I figure they could really sell a ton of them that way AND put PSVR games onto PC when they want as well. I think it would only make them money. Especially if the price is on point.

    • Roadrunner

      I doubt that they can make much money on the hardware, probably the headset is sold subsidized in the hope of earning money through further software sales.
      On the PS5, they get their share of every VR game sold (probably the usual 30%). With users who only use the headset on the PC, they would earn nothing and not be able to recoup the subsidy for the device.

    • Andrew Jakobs

      I don’t think they will do that, I think it will be thirdparty software again that will make it possible, just like with the current PSVR headset or move controllers.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        I don’t think they will do that either, and it will be much harder for third party software to make the PCVR 2 PC compatible. The PSVR 1 was basically just a display with an integrated IMU, the tracking was done externally, while the PSVR 2 will be a much more complex beast. They are using the USB-C DP alternate mode, meaning pretty much all the transfer capacity will go to the image signal and only a USB-2 channel remains for transferring data back to the PS5. Which is not enough to send the signal from the integrated cameras and doing the inside-out tracking on the console, this has to happen inside the PSVR 2.

        Which means that Sony could easily prevent others from making PSVR 2 usable with a PC with some signal analysis and reverse engineering by simply encrypting that information. It will be interesting to see if they do. They will not actively support it for the reasons everybody has mentioned, but they may have a bigger interest in keeping PCVR alive than just selling a few Sony studio titles on Steam.

        If Sony is seriously pushing PSVR 2, meaning they are going for a much higher percentage of PS5 users than the 5% they got on PS4, then they have future plans for the platform. Their main competitor with getting the dominant VR platform wouldn’t be Valve, it would be Meta. Valve just sells games with similar conditions like Sony on a hardware platform that Sony doesn’t address directly, and while the platforms themselves compete to a certain degree, PC and console gamers tend to pick them for very different reasons. So Valve and PCVR is much more compatible to Sony’s vision of selling software to mostly gamers than Meta’s vision of becoming an intermediary for a whole new ecosystem that in the long run may also endanger Sony’s revenue sources.

        So Sony may actually be enticed to unofficially allow using the PSVR 2 with a PC despite possibly losing some revenue due to subsidized hardware and less game sales, simply to support PCVR and keep Meta from actually becoming even more the dominant VR player they obviously want to be. And in theory this could even mean that they will actively support PCVR in some (indirect) way, by simply not making it harder, providing useful technical documentation or even working with Valve to make PSVR 2 SteamVR/OpenXR compliant. Not very likely, but also not impossible.

    • ApocalypseShadow

      As others have said since I was going to come here and say the same thing but decided on yard work instead. It doesn’t make sense for Sony to do this when the point is to sell the PS5 which is to sell the VR headset which is to sell PS5. They are paired together. No point pushing it for PC at all.

      Sony’s not pushing their HD Camera for PC. They are not pushing Dual Sense for PC. They are not pushing their Blu-ray remote for PC. They aren’t pushing their 3D Audio Headset for PC. They aren’t pushing their new games day one on PC. Why expect their VR headset for PC?

      Unless, Sony was going to create their own PC store that rivals Steam, GOG, Epic, etc. And put their old flat games from prior eras, newer games after some time after console or PS5 release and VR games. And get 3rd parties to jump in on that. They will not do it when Valve or Epic would be making all the money on royalties.

      The reality is that PC gamers just want another headset to play with just to have it since it has features PC headsets lack with it all built in. If PC gamers buy the headset just to get it to work on PC, they are taking away the headset from PlayStation gamers looking to use it on PS5. It may seem like a sell regardless. But if you’re not buying VR games on PS5 or even flat games, those gamers would actually hurt Sony and sales in the long run. Doesn’t matter if one owns a PC and a PS5. If you don’t buy games on PlayStation which is what the headset was made for, Sony gets no money from their 1st Party games or royalties from developers.

      PC gamers need to stay away from it until Sony has sold enough of them for PS5 and make their investment back. How about PC manufacturers get on the ball and create headsets with similar features and stop expecting Sony when their ecosystem is PlayStation. HTC, Pimax, Valve, etc are more than capable of building similar stuff. Possibly even improve on it.

      • Blinkin73

        You are right. They are not pushing that at all, but Sony is not just Playstation either. They were making camcorders and stereo’s and digital cameras and you name it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they came out with a pcvr model eventually to cover that area. They already know how to do it. I don’t think it’s much of a leap. Then again, if they did sell it as an all around system, they could seriously profit. Especially if they kept the exclusives on the ps5. If the games are good, people will buy the system anyway.

        • ApocalypseShadow

          The questions still remain. I’m a aware they are a hardware company among other things.

          If Sony’s not making VR games for PC, why would they release a headset for it or make it compatible? What’s the incentive?

          What gaming hardware has Sony released for PC in the past? Dual Shock? Eyetoy? PS Eye? PS Move? Sixaxis? PSVR? Nope.

          What were they built for? Where does Sony make most of their money from when it comes to gaming?

      • Average Gamer

        They kinda are pushing Dual Sense for PC. They now have a separate page on the Playstation website that advertise the Dualsense, and Spider-Man Remastered for PC listed the Dualsense as a BIG feature of the PC port.

    • ViRGiN

      dude, stop getting desperate.
      fuck pcvr. let it rest. sony has ZERO, ABSOLUTETLY ZERO reasons to add PCVR support.

      • Blinkin73

        desperate is hardly the word I would use. Why fuck pcvr? Show me on the dolly where it touched you. There are plenty of great pcvr games out there. If they don’t push it everywhere they can, VR as a whole will suffer. Of course, it won’t really matter in the end. I think someone will figure out a way to make it work with PC anyway and some developers may even make some games to accommodate its abilities or add functionality to existing titles. Anything is possible.

        • ViRGiN

          anything is possible? you can dream of anything, but not “anything” is possible when it comes to vr.
          there never will be support for “abilities” of psvr2 if someone even manages to have it working with steamvr.

      • Carnel

        this dude is so desparate for PCVR to die, like it or not it’s here to stay buddy

    • Andross

      it will problably remain only a dream, but doesn’t matter, I’ll join you!

    • Arno van Wingerde

      – Edit: Roadrunner already made the same point.

      • ApocalypseShadow

        He seemed to not get it. Sony is in the business to promote PlayStation. So there’s no incentive. Even PS Aim didn’t release for PC. I wonder why?

  • ApocalypseShadow

    The price helps them a lot subsidizing and trying to monopolize the market.

    But I’ll admit that it shows that PC manufacturers needed to seize on this and should have made high quality headsets that have what Quest has in features. Making expensive headsets most can’t buy is not the answer. Which is Valve’s problem and Pimax problem.

    Tech has improved that they can match Quest but leave all the onboard standalone tech and battery out and lowering the price. HTC built Vive Flo that was small enough and similar enough to be used for PC. Add in the tracking and controllers for $500-$600 and it would have sold. But as we know with HTC, they went in another direction and dropped the ball again. A headset that small would have killed it.

    Microsoft partnered with PC manufacturers for cheaper headsets. The idea was sound. Add a battery and wireless antenna for generation 2 and they would have done well. Nope. Microsoft didn’t support all those headsets with games. You can’t make a razor but make no blades. Gamers bought it to use on Steam. And lack of improvements killed it.

    Facebook is only cashing in on other company’s lack of forethought and management. PC gamers want high quality. They want their games capable of high quality. They want a headset with many features that will last a long time before upgrading. They want the latest which is small, comfy and the possibility of wireless. How these manufacturers are this ignorant in not competing against Facebook is anyone’s guess. Doesn’t matter if the headset is $100-$150 more. Give them a product of high quality without the need to be connected to Facebook and gamers would have bought it. It’s actually less money spent than what gamers will be paying for over time when Facebook sells all that data they collect to advertise to you. That $100-$150 extra would be a bargain for your privacy.

  • brandon9271

    Fanboism exists EVERY WHERE because people are tribal in nature about everything. Politics, sports teams.. favorite soda flavors.. It’s really ridiculous.

    • Nepenthe

      Fanboism is the spice of life. Wait, that’s not right… ugh, never mind.

  • Ardra Diva

    My Quest 2 with USB 3 cable is actually a much better experience than my original Rift. The ‘experimental’ 120Hz setting in the Quest 2 has pretty much eliminated any hint of motion sickness for me, also.

  • Thud

    Still Lol Cary?

  • Derrick

    Hmm. Omg.

  • ViRGiN

    Did you come here to say it straight after masturbating? That’s how lonely you are?