HiGame

Ever since HTC and Oculus launched their respective headsets earlier this year, people have wondered which company had shipped more units and how the VR market was evolving as a whole. The Vive took an early lead over the Rift, thanks to unexplained component shortages that took several months for the Facebook subsidiary to iron out. But both firms have been shipping on time for months. Today, Oculus and HTC both promise to ship within a matter of days, not the weeks or months it took earlier this year.

Unfortunately, that immediate shipping promise may be partly because very few people are buying into VR at all. Steam’s Hardware Survey isn’t perfect — in fact, it tends to regularly have problems identifying video card makes and models correctly, months or even years after AMD and Nvidia launch new products. In VR, however, there are only a handful of SKUs that need to be tracked, and one of them is a headset Steam partnered with. The figures we see here should be closer to accurate, and what they show is quite concerning.

Steam gives us two pieces of information. First, the market split between the various headsets it tracks (HTC Vive 59.8%, Oculus Rift 30.22%, Oculus Rift DK2 9.98%). Given that the vast majority of gamers of all types have Steam, this suggests the HTC Vive has outsold the Rift roughly 2:1, with a fairly steady group of DK2 owners.

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