Another year of VR gaming has come and gone, and Valve has again released its annual sales figures for the past year, highlighting the best-selling VR titles on Steam.

Valve has published a series of ‘The Best of 2022‘ charts showing which titles on Steam have fared the best across several metrics. Among the charts is a list of the top 100 best-selling VR games on Steam in 2022, as measured by gross revenue.

You’ll find titles broken up from Bronze to Platinum level, however take note that Valve intentionally obscures which game ranks higher within each individual tier. Reload the page, and each title is shuffled, so there’s no telling which game did better within a given section.

Here we take a look at the top 23 games across the Gold and Platinum tiers. To give a little more context, we’ve sorted games by their positive user review scores. Oh, and don’t forget: many of these games are currently on sale during Steam’s Winter Sale, which ends on January 5th at 10AM PT.

Platinum

Game Release
Positive User Review
VTOL VR 2017 98%
Half-Life: Alyx 2020 98%
Blade & Sorcery 2018 [EA] 96%
Beat Saber 2019 96%
Pavlov 2017 [EA] 94%
Into the Radius 2020 93%
BONEWORKS 2019 92%
BONELAB 2022 92%
Zenith: The Last City 2022 [EA] 83%
SUPERHOT VR 2017 83%
After the Fall 2021 77%
Skyrim VR 2018 75%

As you can gather from the chart, 2022 wasn’t a big year for PC VR gaming in terms of fresh and popular releases, with only two titles released in 2022 hitting the highest rung of Steam sales: Zenith: The Last City and BONELAB.

In the platinum tier, 25% of titles were released in 2017, 17% in 2018, 17% in 2019, 17% in 2020, and 8% in 2021. Of those titles, 25% were marked Early Access.

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Gold

Game Release
Positive User Review
Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades 2016 [EA] 97%
Hard Bullet 2020 [EA] 88%
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners 2020 88%
Hellsplit: Arena 2019 [EA] 85%
Cooking Simulator VR 2021 85%
Contractors 2018 84%
Legendary Tales 2021 [EA] 83%
Blood Trail 2019 [EA] 80%
VR Kanjo 2018 76%
Onward 2016 [EA] 71%
Fallout 4 VR 2017 64%

Here you’ll notice a lot more early access titles, offering up 55% of this year’s gold-tier sales.  None of these were released in 2022 however, which is a bit of a downer for newcomers.

On the flipside, many of these titles have benefitted from steadfast developer support, with titles like Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, Hellsplit: Arena, Contractors, Hard Bullet, and Legendary Tales seeing updates over the course of the year.

In the gold tier, 18% of titles were released in 2016, 9% in 2017, 18% in 2018, 18% in 2019, 18% in 2020, and 18% in 2021—a strangely even spread.

– – — – –

Check out the full list of Steam’s top selling VR titles in 2022 to see which games made it into the Silver and Bronze tiers.

Looking for this year’s top VR games across platforms? Check out Road to VR’s 2022 Game of the Year & Design Award winners. You’re sure to see some familiar faces.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Paul Bellino

    Glad to see VR Kanjo is still up there. It deserves it especially with the nudity mod. Even if you try it once it’s well worth it.

  • Clownworld14

    It’s because of this, I rarely fire up my vr. nothing new, nothing revolutionary, nothing ground-breaking. The vr game market is lame and needs revitalizing. Same old same old…

    • Runesr2

      Hubris, Green Hell VR, Kayak VR Mirage, Half-Life 2 VR Mod, Moss Book 2, Wanderer, Alyx Levitation, Red Matter 2, Ultrawings 2, Vox Machinae singleplayer etc.

      Many awesome VR launched in 2022. Even two AAA games, Hitman 3 VR and F1 22.

      • David

        I mean, let’s be honest, Hitman 3 VR was absolute garbage and an utter embarrassment to the VR scene. The rest of your point stands though (IMO)

      • ViRGiN

        wow

      • Mike EY

        They’re forced drama & terrorist simulators, the same as 2D games.

  • XRC

    As Summer Redstone of Viacom famously said about television programming, “Content is king.”

    VR urgently needs highly compelling, quality content that leverages the unique strengths of the medium.

    New hardware is great, but playing same old titles in higher resolution won’t change anything fundamental, which is lack of content?

    • ViRGiN

      what are you even talking about, do you even own vr?
      half life alyx on pcvr alone is enough to carry the industry for the next 15 years.

      • Mike EY

        One game isn’t content. HL:A is a genuine $1000 game to match the hardware though.

        There’s a creativity problem in all fields of entertainment.

        • shadow9d9

          You talk about a game whose first 4/5 hours are a slog through dark, linear corridors, and then you mention wanting creativity…

  • Sam Huston

    MSFS 2020 on a RTX 4090 is the only way to do VR.

    Keyboard drop.

    • MasterElwood

      Just needs a Pimax 12K…

  • ViRGiN

    glad to see PCVR is FaR from dead

  • VTOL VR? W… T…. F….. I’m calling Shenanigans!

    One game that, SOMEHOW, always slips below the radar of most VR Players is The Forest. It’s a top-notch VR game and even better in Co-Op. My friend and myself played it for around 200+ hours.

    It’s also disheartening that Moss never seems to make the list.

    And Beat Saber. GACK, BEAT SABER! Stupid box punching, glowstick game. Music games are always so LAME… except Thumper! That game was MIND BLOWING! Another, often over looked game.

    • yosiema77

      The forest VR is amazing, sure thing, but so is beat saber, I downloaded sh*tload of custom levels though

    • squirrel

      I am really curious why you say Thumper was “MIND BLOWING”. Especially when claiming Beat Saber and others were lame.

      I really tried to like Thumper. But in my opinion, Thumper is the one that was the lame rhythm game. Very limited controls, just bump left, bump right, jump, and maybe a couple others. It was very repetitive with apparently the same boss guy at the end of each level. Music wasn’t engaging. I was completely bored by about level 4 trying to understand why this limited, boring, repetitive game was so highly reviewed, and refunded it.

  • FrankB

    The only thing propping up PCVR right now is flat to VR conversions. Let’s hope the forthcoming PSVR2 can boost VR creativity and AAA releases, though looking at all the shovelware and crappy quest 2 conversions on the release list I’m not overly optimistic.

    • ViRGiN

      right now? always has been.
      but it’s the kind of VR that interests noone and doesn’t bring any industry any further.

      modded VR is dead VR.

    • shadow9d9

      For generic mainstreamers who need big budget pretty games, sure it is dead. For people that play multiple genres, it is doing well.

  • cleaverboy

    hopefully with PSVR2, there will be more VR games targeting PC-level hardware.

    • ViRGiN

      no, not PC-level hardware that various from person to person, but one unified hardware that every developer can target.

  • More than the classification of most sold games, what is relevant here is that only 2 games from all the ones in the gold and platinum tiers are from 2022

    • wheeler

      I guess the question is “how do you solve it?”. The reflex response to this is “just pay devs to make big VR games”. But at this point I feel like there’s quite a large backlog of good VR content, and yet we still have the same retention problems and it’s not like everyone goes back and buys all of these games. They buy a few and then their usage gradually fades. And the completion rates for these games–even HLA–are very bad as well, which should not be the case if there really isn’t anything else worth playing. However, things like VRChat appear to have the most consistent usage–e.g. looking at the online player counts the number of PCVR users in VRChat may be considerable relative to the number of PCVR users in all other PCVR games combined.

      Also, just noticing this now – Recroom is incorporated into vrlfg but according to the developers the percentage of VR players is actually very small, so I don’t know why it’s listed in what are supposed to be VR Only games. That would reduce total concurrent PCVR players (around 15k) by 1k to 3k (again, not including VRChat–whatever VR user percentage of around 30k players).

      I feel like we all have this fantasy about the ideal VR content that would cause everyone to hook up their VR headsets again, but in that fantasy we forget all of the problems with the technology. In addition, it seems like that fantasy causes us to ignore what users are naturally being drawn to (even without billions in artificial stimulus). So much money has been dumped into this at this point that more and more I feel like the only problem we can actually solve right now is in re-calibrating our expectations (That is, instead of just being bitter about the “dream” we were sold on not manifesting in an acceptable time frame). I wonder what we’ll blame next.

  • shadow9d9

    Bonelab proves that good games don’t sell. Big names and hype on mainstream forums sell games.