Steam Survey Suggests Rift Sales Gaining On Vive

Steam Survey Suggests Rift Sales Gaining On Vive

The Oculus Rift is at the tail end of a massive summer sale, and the latest Steam hardware survey results suggest it’s had a big impact on sales.

According to GamesIndustry.biz, Rift’s share of Steam users increased by 8.1% over July’s hardware survey, taking its total to 43.81% of all VR headsets used by those that opt-in to the survey. Vive, meanwhile, decreased by 7.7% to 52.31%. Valve and HTC’s headset is still comfortably ahead of the Rift, then, but the big gain suggests that the Oculus summer sale has played a significant role in helping Facebook’s device play catch up.

Rift has been priced at $399 during the sale, which has been running since early July. That price includes the Oculus Touch controllers, too. At the start of the sale, this made Rift a full $400 cheaper than the Vive.

Again, participation in this survey is entirely optional, so this in no way confirms that there are more Vives out there than Rifts, but it’s one of the few ways in which we can at least gauge how the PC-based VR market might be shaping up while HTC and Oculus remain tight-lipped.

While Oculus itself hasn’t revealed any official sales figures for the Oculus Rift thus far, VP of Content Jason Rubin has said that sales are “strong” following the summer promotion. Now that it’s over, Rift and Touch are available at the new permanent price of $499, a $100 drop from the price before the summer sale.

HTC, meanwhile, just dropped the price of the Vive by $200 to $599, so it could be that we see more gains for HTC coming September’s survey. Even with these price cuts, these headsets require expensive PCs to run, and the amount of people willing to jump into VR will still be limited.

Next month sees Oculus host its next developer conference, Oculus Connect 4. Given the positive buzz around Rift sales recently, could we possibly see sales figures revealed there?