Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Must-read report from Road to VR, which estimates that Half-Life Alyx, despite my own assessment, might just be a bit of a killer app for VR after all:

While Valve’s data is a useful way see which headsets are most popular on Steam, the trend of monthly-connected headsets has always been obfuscated because the data is given exclusively as percentages relative to Steam’s population—which itself is an unstated and constantly fluctuating figure… From the model we estimate that April added nearly 950,000 monthly-connected VR headsets over the month prior, for a total of some 2.7 million headsets. That’s both the greatest total number and the largest single leap in the history of the data.

You can see the "Gotta play Alyx, gotta play Alyx!" jump starting in February prior to the game's March debut. (Curiously, Alyx was way more of a driver than the holiday shopping season of 2019.)

Since my brand includes "guy who thinks VR has some great niche use cases but is skeptical it will ever go mass market", I'll inject some obligatory qualifiers:

Judging by the relatively low user concurrency rates of Half-Life Alyx (peaking at just mid-five figures  even though nearly 1 million people own a copy), most VR owners only played part of the game. Which strongly suggests they either didn't like the game itself (unlikely, given the extremely high user ratings), or soured on playing it in VR.

More problematic: While Alyx being a VR-only game did apparently add 1 million VR users to the total install base, Alyx is also one of those rare black swans: A game associated with a hugely popular franchise that the highly successful developer/publishers was also willing to make a VR-only game. Privately owned and flush with cash (and more key, its own VR headset to sell), Valve is one of those rare companies in a position to limit its addressable market like that. Sony could potentially do the same to grow the market for its PSVR system, but as a publicly traded company, I doubt major shareholders would be super-enthused by such a risky move. 

So while Alyx did drive fairly strong VR adaption, companies like Valve (and probably only Valve) would have to keep pumping out dozens of other great VR-only/VR-first games and other content to really make VR mass market. (Compare that 2.7 million install base with the install base of just one game console, the Nintendo Switch, which now stands at about 54 million.)

Anyway, much more to read in this Road to VR report here.