Steam Gauge: What VR games are popular with HTC Vive’s early adopters [Updated]

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.

For this analysis, we focused on games that were designed for the HTC Vive and its hand-tracking Lighthouse controllers. Games designed to be played exclusively with a standard controller or mouse/keyboard were omitted, since Oculus Rift owners playing through Steam could skew the data for these titles, causing an apples-to-oranges comparison with Vive-exclusive games. Our data on such Rift games is incomplete, in any case, without information from the competing Oculus Store. Some games that support both Lighthouse controllers and standard controls were included, however.

All estimates in this piece were accurate as of May 6. Aggregate data used to generate the below graphs is available on the next page.

How much hardware?

Steam Gauge can't directly tell us how many HTC Vive units have been shipped to users so far, but it can give us a rough idea. That's because each Vive headset currently comes packaged with free download codes for three titles: Job Simulator, Fantastic Contraption, and Tilt Brush.

The Steam Gauge data is a bit confusing on this score, though. While both Tilt Brush and Fantastic Contraption hover around 40,000 estimated registered users so far, Job Simulator is much less popular, with only about 24,000 users in Steam Gauge's count (Fig. 1). This could be an artifact of our system's sampling, or it could suggest that users are simply less eager to download Job Simulator after they get their VR rooms set up.

Even stranger, there are a few HTC Vive titles that appear to be more popular than the hardware's free pack-in games. In particular, The Lab and Surgeon Simulator VR have more downloads than any of the temporarily free games packed with the hardware, racking up more than 81,000 and 73,000 estimated owners so far, respectively.

There is some evidence online that some Oculus Rift users may be downloading these free, Steam-exclusive titles, hacking together a control solution by using Razer's Hydra motion-sensing controllers to act as stand-ins for the Vive's Lighthouse controllers. The Lab and Surgeon Simulator also have unusually high numbers of owners who have yet to play the games, suggesting many people may simply be downloading the free-to-play titles even though they don't yet have their own VR headsets.

With all those caveats in place, our best guess right now is that there are somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 HTC Vive units out in the wild at this point (give or take). That's not a bad start for a completely new technology that has seen its fair share of production and shipping delays. Still, it's a pretty small initial market for software makers to take advantage of. By contrast, both the Xbox One and PS4 sold a million units worldwide in their first weekend day of retail availability. Non-VR games on Steam launch with a potential audience that numbers in the tens of millions. VR developers are going to have to wait quite a while before they see anything like that audience.

[Update: Triangular Pixels' Kate Goode points out that HTC Vive developer units came with a key that unlocked a wide variety of HTC Vive software for free. This list includes Tilt Brush and Fantastic Contraption, but not Job Simulator, which would account for the significant discrepancy between those games in our data.

Based on this new information, our best guess is that about 25,000 to 30,000 HTC Vive units have been sent to consumers, while about 10,000 to 15,000 dev kits are floating around as well. This has a significant impact on the revenue data discussed below, and means that "player" data might be more reliable than "owner" data in determining what games are actually popular thus far.]

What’s selling?

Despite the low hardware ceiling, a few VR games have already managed to make a minor splash in the VR marketplace. Audioshield and Space Pirate Trainer seem to be the most popular paid games on the HTC Vive so far, riding positive press coverage and easy-to-grasp gameplay to more than 25,000 sales each in their first month (Water Bears VR's low player numbers and daily sales pattern suggest its "sales" were skewed by a free giveaway). A few cheap or free non-gaming experiences are also pretty popular on the headset, including the exploratory Heaven Island Life, Ikea's room-building "experience," and the Minecraft-inspired realities.

These aren't necessarily the most popular SteamVR experiences so far, however. When you look at the number of actual players (owners who have logged more than zero hours on the game), titles like Windlands and Hover Junkers start to look much more successful than their relatively low sales would suggest (Fig. 2).

Windlands especially seems to keep players entranced with an average of 3.89 hours spent per owner and more than 56,000 hours total (Figs. 3 and 4), by far the largest of any HTC Vive games we looked at (though people playing the game in its non-VR mode may be skewing that number). CyberPong VR seems to be an addictive hit, too, averaging 2.6 hours of playtime per owner despite having just a week of availability during our sample (though a relatively small sample of actual players may be skewing that number).

On the one hand, these kinds of player engagement numbers pale in comparison to the most popular traditional Steam games, which can average dozens or even hundreds of hours of playtime per owner. On the other hand, Vive titles have only had a month so far to rack up those play hours. It will be interesting to see which VR titles players keep coming back to month after month and which ones lose their luster after some initial early adopter experimentation.

Steam Gauge can also give us some idea of the total revenue HTC Vive games have brought in thus far (Fig. 5) (see important update above). While we tried to take temporary sales prices into account in this calculation, the vagaries of Steam Gauge's daily sampling mean that revenue estimates could be a little less accurate than owner and player statistics.

Still, overall, we can make a first-order estimate that Vive developers altogether have brought in about $5 to $6 million in revenue so far (not including any in-game purchases for free-to-play titles). That's obviously a drop in the bucket for a Steam marketplace that sells hundreds of millions of dollars in software every month, but it's not bad for an audience that amounts to tens of thousands of headset owners.

Looking at VR game pricing, $20 seems to be the sweet spot for the best performing paid Vive titles as far as total revenue is concerned. Most VR games that sell for much cheaper than that struggle to make up for the lower cost in much higher unit sales so far. Meanwhile, Hover Junkers has managed to bring in a decent amount of revenue even at its highest-in-class price of $35.

You can take a look at the close-to-raw data for the HTC Vive titles in our Steam Gauge database on the next page. Overall, though, our data shows that the initial VR gold rush may take a while to truly pay off (if it ever does) and that early HTC Vive developers need to be patient in waiting for the marketplace to develop.