For years now, we’ve been hearing dueling predictions about the eventual fate of high-end, consumer-grade virtual reality. Will the technology cause a revolution in gaming and computer interaction? Will it quickly become a faddish flop? Or are we looking at something in between?
It will likely take years to fully answer those questions. But a month after the launch of the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, software sales estimates from Ars Technica’s Steam Gauge project can at least give us some idea of how quickly one branch of PC-based virtual reality is getting off the ground. The answer, it seems, is a small, slow, and steady start for an HTC Vive market that’s still quite limited by lack of hardware in players’ homes.
We’ll note right up front that Steam Gauge doesn’t give precise sales or gameplay data for Steam games. Instead, it generates estimates for gameplay and ownership based on random sampling of public data from Steam’s own API. While there may be a small margin of error from actual sales numbers, this data should be accurate enough to provide a general view of the market. More details on the Steam Gauge methodology and its limitations can be found in our initial write-up. Read More…
