Quest 3 & Quest 3S made up 28% of SteamVR usage in January, after seeing significant growth in recent months.
What Is The Steam Hardware Survey?
The Steam Hardware & Software Survey is offered to a random sample of Steam’s user base each month. If you accept, it uploads a list of your PC specs and peripherals to Valve, as well as any headset used on SteamVR in the past month.
The data comes from the Steam Hardware & Software Survey, and shows Meta’s current generation headset family nearing the usage of Quest 2, which made up just under 32% on SteamVR in January.
While Quest 3S uses the same display and lenses as Quest 2, for PC VR it has support for the 6 GHz band of Wi-Fi 6E, and its decoder can handle the AV1 codec as well as higher bitrates for H264 and HEVC. Quest 3 has these improvements too, of course, but goes far further with its precisely adjustable sharp pancake lenses and higher resolution panels.
We’re grouping Quest 3 and Quest 3S as a “family” in our analysis for a very simple reason: SteamVR sees Quest 3S headsets as ‘Quest 3’ when using Meta’s official Quest Link feature, and Virtual Desktop’s developer Guy Godin confirmed to UploadVR that Quest 3S headsets using his tool report to SteamVR as ‘Quest 3’ too.
This means that the 4.85% figure for Quest 3S in Valve’s data only represents those using its Steam Link app for Quest, and the 23.26% for Quest 3 includes Quest 3S from Quest Link and Virtual Desktop. Thus, all we can accurately say is that Quest 3 and 3S together make up 28.11%.
Together, Meta’s Quest and Rift headsets make up just under 70% of SteamVR usage, with Valve remaining in distant second with just 13.2% share from Index.
The Valve Index is now almost six years old, and has very low resolution by today’s standards. Over the past year its usage has steadily declined as new headsets like Quest 3 and Bigscreen Beyond entice owners to upgrade. Valve has been working on a new headset for years now, though, and its controllers leaked in November, suggesting this might just be the year it finally launches.
