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Half-Life: Alyx Adds Nearly 1 Million VR Users to Steam in Record Gain

Shadowmask72
Honored Visionary
A new article from R2VR.

https://www.roadtovr.com/steam-survey-vr-headset-growth-april-2020-half-life-alyx/


The launch of Half-Life: Alyx saw nearly 1 million additional monthly-connected headsets over the prior month, a leap that nearly tripled the previous largest monthly gain.
Each month Valve collects info from Steam users to determine some baseline statistics about what kind of hardware and software is used by the platform’s population, and to see how things are changing over time, including the use of VR headsets.
The latest Steam Survey data is the first time we’re seeing the impact of Half-Life: Alyx in the numbers; although the game launched in late March, Valve advised that most survey data is collected early in each month, so the impact of the game’s launch wasn’t truly revealed until now. And it’s a doozy.




System Specs: MSI NVIDIA RTX 4090 , i5 13700K CPU, 32GB DDR 4 RAM, Win 11 64 Bit OS.
109 REPLIES 109

BrunoAra
Explorer
Very interesting statistics, but I bet these are not all new users...1M of new users when the game has sold 1M+ copies is non realistic. But even if it is just old users using VR again, it is anyway an amazing news for the whole ecosystem! We need more engagement

OmegaM4N
Expert Trustee
Great news, the more that join the party the better.
CV1/Vive-knuckles)/Dell Vr Visor/Go/Quest II/ PSVR.

kevinw729
Honored Visionary
Momentous news of the the VR community - obviously the conditions for launch were not ideal, and many that want to try the game do not have access to hardware during lock-down. The record breaking Twitch and streaming service Let-Play viewership proves the interest. I hope that Valve can match the interest and keep the momentum going. Their announcement with HP on the new Steam VR deal should also make adoption for some newcomers more attractive. 
https://vrawards.aixr.org/ "The Out-of-Home Immersive Entertainment Frontier: Expanding Interactive Boundaries in Leisure Facilities" https://www.amazon.co.uk/Out-Home-Immersive-Entertainment-Frontier/dp/1472426959

Anonymous
Not applicable
Just completed Alyx this morning.
Wow - absolutely incredible experience. It has been some time since a game captivated me to this extent to where
I could not put it down and played all the way through, at least without playing any of my other games in the meantime.
For me I would have to give Alyx 10 stars out of 10.
And absolutely an incredible ending.

Zenbane
MVP
MVP
Every game and platform is hitting new records, considering the pandemic. The large influx to Steam is the result of the Coronavirus moreso than any single gaming title. Even I am on Steam now moreso than ever due to the self-quarantine.

Don't get me wrong, there's no denying that Half-Life: Alex is a great VR video game. But attributing the VR User influx to this title alone is quite the stretch. Just look at the constant out-of-stock inventory of both the Rift-S and Quest. They are selling out fast because people are investing in home entertainment now more than ever. People aren't trying to mass-buy the Quest for HL:A.

Hell, I have been trying to buy gym equipment for my home for the past two months, and everything is out-of-stock in town. I'm surprised these e-Journalists aren't saying that Half-Life: Alex is the cause of the mass toilet paper shortage lol

Looking at the figures, HL:A has sold around 700,000 copies to date so that figure in itself would have to be divided between those people who already have headsets and those who've gotten into VR since the game was announced.

I'd expect a big proportion of existing users to have bought the game but equally I'm guessing it will have spurred some people to pick up their headset after not using it for a while so I'm not dissing it at all... it definitely will have drawn people to Steam while they're playing the game as opposed to non-Steam VR games in their library, until they finish it and get onto/back to other titles (and as Zenbane says I'd be curious to know how our current situation has affected VR use of both Steam and Oculus).

I'd guess at maybe 20% of the 700,000 are new users 80% existing users? just a wild guess. HL:A is definitely a good thing for VR whichever way you cut it, personally I think it's one of a number of great games rather than a game changer and I really hope it's not a one-off from Valve.

Edit: I'm playing The Room VR atm and unfortunately that won't be showing up in any survey but it's definitely grabbed me.

RuneSR2
Grand Champion

dburne said:

Just completed Alyx this morning.
Wow - absolutely incredible experience. It has been some time since a game captivated me to this extent to where
I could not put it down and played all the way through, at least without playing any of my other games in the meantime.
For me I would have to give Alyx 10 stars out of 10.
And absolutely an incredible ending.



Fully agree - not even Lone Echo delivers such quality, although it's a bit hard for me to write that because Lone Echo has been my favorite VR game for years. 

I guess tons of people are now buying hmds just to be able to play Alyx - of course Oculus will benefit from Alyx too, maybe Oculus will get a push bigger than all their exclusives combined. 

A few weeks ago Superdata, for what it's worth, estimated 860k downloaded copies of Alyx, and SteamSpy says something in-between 500k and 1 mill Alyx copies have been downloaded, so 860k might not necessarily be wrong. 

Alyx now has 25,000 ratings/reviews on Steam. Lone Echo has 4,500 in the Oculus Store. Asgard's Wrath has 3,000. Stormland has 1,750 - with Robo Recall (free with Touch) being the king of Oculus exclusives with 11,200 ratings. 

Still hard to compare, because we don't know the ratio of sold games per rating, but it seems that the number of Alyx ratings in less than 2 months are close to the 4 major Oculus exclusives combined (Stormland, Asgard's Wrath, Lone Echo and Robo Recall). There're more Oculus exclusives, but many have not gotten a lot of ratings and are not considered in the same ("AAA"-ish) league.  

The only games with more ratings than Alyx seems to be Beat Saber. Seems like Alyx indeed is the biggest platform push ever when counting games released from companies that also sell hmds.

Interesting when/if Alyx goes beyond 1 mill copies downloaded... 

The biggest limitation to the Alyx platform push may be that nearly all hmds are unavailable - if it was possible to buy hmds from Valve and Oculus without having to wait weeks or months, I wonder how much bigger the Alyx push would have been. 2c.

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

RuneSR2
Grand Champion

kevinw729 said:

Momentous news of the the VR community - obviously the conditions for launch were not ideal, and many that want to try the game do not have access to hardware during lock-down. The record breaking Twitch and streaming service Let-Play viewership proves the interest. I hope that Valve can match the interest and keep the momentum going. Their announcement with HP on the new Steam VR deal should also make adoption for some newcomers more attractive. 


I'm thinking much the same - if availability of Valve and Oculus hmds hadn't suffered from Covid-19 reductions, the Alyx effect may have been even bigger. I've read many persons saying they bought a hmd just to play Alyx. Interesting how sales go when the lock-down stops... the Alyx effect may be here for a long time... 


EDIT: Just read that Valve now ships to Italy again - hopefully we'll see more normal hmd availability before Summmer...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/ghk0zb/valve_ships_to_italy_again/

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

OmegaM4N
Expert Trustee
^^Oh there is no doubt that the present crisis has hit sales of the game and VR hardware, so it will be interesting to see how it adds to those sales once the supply chain get back up to scratch, assuming it will in 2020, we just don't know with this thing.
CV1/Vive-knuckles)/Dell Vr Visor/Go/Quest II/ PSVR.