Video Game News: Number of Steam VR users has doubled by the end of 2018

According to data from Steam Hardware Survey, the number of Virtual Reality headset users has doubled in ownership. The number of Steam users who owned VR headsets was at 0.4 percent of all users in January 2018 and by December 2018, that number went up to 0.8 percent.

This is a very small number of users of course. This is roughly the same amount of users as the number of Linux users in Steam. There are no hard numbers, since Steam releases their data in percentages. If we assume Steam's claim of 90 million in October 2018, that roughly comes up to about 720,000 users.

Among all the VR headset owners, the majority are using Oculus Rift, at about 46.54 percent of users using the hardware. The HTC Vive is a close second, without about 40.82 percent of users using it. The minority are Windows Mixed reality at 8.89%, Huawei VR and others making up the rest of the data.

VR as a technology is still in its early stages. The teething stage may take a while to develop as VR games still only enjoy a niche crowd. While the technology is mind blowing and the potential, limitless gamers will probably need to wait for a while before it's true potential can be unlocked.

Developing games for VR is complicated and expensive and headsets are also quite expensive. But as we have seen, the numbers have grown and VR is popularized by other manufacturers such as Samsung as well. The development of this technology has only been as intensely developed since the beginning of this decade.

It is too difficult or far fetched to predict anything. The sales of VR headsets and VR games have only slowly begun to see an increase and we will need to see how well VR games and technology will perform throughout 2019.