Valve’s latest monthly Steam Hardware & Software survey is available. While the last few months have seen ups and downs, July turned out to be a surprisingly stable month for all the headsets on the map.
Each month, Valve runs a survey among Steam users to determine some baseline statistics about what kind of hardware and software is used by the user population, and to see how things are changing over time; that includes which VR headsets are connected to users’ computers. Participation in the survey is optional.
Image courtesy Valve
The July numbers show the Oculus Rift continuing its slight lead in headset marketshare on Steam, now a six month streak, at 46.18% (−0.08%) over the HTC Vive at 44.35% (−0.21%). Meanwhile Windows VR headsets gain slightly from those loses, now at 6.41% (+0.16%).
Interestingly, the Oculus Rift DK2 development kit is still hanging on to 1.25% (−0.26%) share of headsets on Steam. The HTC Vive Pro, while not officially designated in the data, appears to have slowly snuck into the standings, likely making up a missing 1.81% (+0.39%) of the pie.
According to the July figures, overall 0.65% (−0.05%) of the sampled Steam users had VR headsets connected to their computers at the time of the survey. Hardware sales and content are major drivers for the VR headset figures seen on the Steam Hardware & Software Survey, but certainly not the only factors. New users joining Steam (who are less likely than not to own a VR headset) may also make overall percentages shrink even if the gross headset numbers are static or increasing.
Overall these are small changes and show that July was a month of relative stability compared to other months where changes of a full percentage point or more are not uncommon. With changes so small, it’s hard to pinpoint what each movement might mean, though it stands to reason that the continued sales on Windows VR headsets are likely helping their slow but steady gain of headset marketshare on Steam.
Pico Interactive, the Beijing-based standalone VR headset manufacturer, successfully completed a ¥167.5 million RMB (~$24.7 million) Series A funding round. To accompany the news, Pico also announced their second iteration of their Goblin standalone headset, dubbed G2.
As reported by YiVian, Pico Interactive’s financing was co-led by GF Qianhe and GF Xinde Investment, with additional participation from Jufeng S&T Venture Investment and others.
“Pico will keep focusing on all-in-one VR and will also increase its investment in 3D sensing (TOF) and AR technologies in the near future,” Pico CEO Henry Zhou said. “In the future, Pico hopes to become a portal-level AI vision company through the layout of VR+AR+TOF technology and products.”
Pico’s first standalone headset, the Neo DK, was first launched in 2016 based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 platform. The company later introduced the Snapdragon 802-based Pico Goblin last summer, which included a 3DOF controller. Near the end of 2017, the company then launched Pico Neo with both 6DOF head tracking and 6DOF controllers, accomplished by ultrasonics.
Working with HTC, the Pico provides app store access to both its own Pico Store as well as HTC’s multiplatform Vive Wave-based Viveport mobile store.
Now the company has announced the latest iteration of its Goblin headset, which includes a higher resolution display and reduced overall weight in comparison to its 2017-era forerunner.
Image courtesy Pico Interactive
According to a company statement, Pico’s G2 headset is a 3DOF headset built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 XR platform with 4+64GB of memory with up to 256GB of micro-SD card expansion. The G2 is also said to feature dual ‘fast response’ LCD screens with a total of 2,880 × 1,600 resolution, a 75Hz refresh rate, and a 101 degree field of view (FOV). The front of the headset includes a monocular RGB camera, allowing for pass-through viewing and hand gesture inputs for menu selections. Like many standalone headsets, G2 will come with a single 3DOF controller.
The headset hasn’t hit Western shores yet, although China-based customers can now order the G2 at ¥2,000 RMB (~$290).
More than just the latest in a long line of niche gadgets, Oculus Go represents the linchpin of Facebook’s lofty goal of putting one billion people into virtual reality. Built with the new or casual user in mind, the device’s non-intimidating tether-free design and Snapdragon 821 mobile processor (which will be two years old in August) manage to keep costs low and user-friendliness high.
Guest Article by J.C. Kuang
J.C. serves as an Analyst at Greenlight Insights in the Devices Group. He has more than three years of experience in market research and analysis and has delivered custom consultancy and presentations for global companies covering ideation, roadmap validation, market sizing, disruptive strategy, and competitor analysis, among other areas. He is based in Boston, Massachusetts.
An improved fresnel lens design addresses a major complaint of Rift owners regarding negative experiences with lens flare, while built-in stereo speakers eliminate the need to fiddle with headphones after fitting the headset—an inconvenience of the Go’s precursor, Gear VR. The headset is also offered with two tiers of non-expandable flash storage (at 32 and 64 GB).
The Go is being lauded by journalists and hardware critics as a major milestone in VR hardware, set to drive adoption to new highs. In contrast to higher-end standalone VR headsets, such as HTC’s Vive Focus and Lenovo’s Mirage Solo, the Go is largely unopposed at its low price point of $200, and has drawn interest from mainstream media outlets as a result. While it lacks an important feature offered by its competitors, 6DoF tracking, the Go represents an otherwise tempting alternative to its pricier competitors, which have notbeen receivedas favorably.
Consumer Perceptions
Initial consumer impressions of Oculus’ overall user experience are positive, according to consumer reviews at online retailers and first impressions from early adopter forums.
A lack of native media apps (such as YouTube) remains a going concern for owners of multiple headsets, who are most aware of the fragmentation currently plaguing VR content pipelines. Meanwhile, high build quality, an intuitive and hassle-free interface, and support for multimedia apps (from major players such as Netflix and Hulu, to more focused platforms such as Plex and Bigscreen), have been consistently popular among buyers. In fact, usage as a portable multimedia device was the most cited use case amongst online user reviews.
Criticisms have been levelled against the headset’s short battery life and a lack of expandable storage. These are noticeable areas where traditional tethered VR excels over the Go (having access to virtually limitless power and storage via a connected gaming PC). Oculus’s own offering, the Rift, has played a major role in setting these expectations for VR usage patterns in the first place. Presumably, these criticisms are of least concern to the company since their other hardware addresses these issues.
The Go relies on a wireless connection to a smartphone for high-level content management, as well as privacy and login functions to ensure fast and functional connection to the Oculus platform. This connection naturally has deep integration with Facebook, which has sparked some infrequent criticisms regarding privacy. While these criticisms are less common among consumers, the persistent uneasiness surrounding privacy at Oculus’ parent company does little to help assuage them.
Approximately 1 month before release, Oculus’ new headset had low aided brand awareness* among all respondents (36%) when compared to the Rift headset during a similar period (42%).
Non-owners of VR headsets reached a low of 28% aided brand awareness*. This data point presents a particularly glaring weakness in the company’s marketing for the Go, which is aimed squarely at onboarding new users to VR.
* “Aided brand awareness” refers to consumer knowledge of a specific brand or product, after being prompted. Might be measured with a question such as “How familiar are you with Oculus?” as opposed to “Can you list three VR headset brands?”
Now that the Go has been available for two and a half months, Greenlight Insights has gathered data from major US electronics retailers showing how customers have received the Go and other standalone headsets, algonside high-end tethered headsets for comparison.
The Future of Go & Standalones
Up until Oculus’ 2017 developer conference, hardware initiatives from HTC, Oculus, and other leading headset makers prioritized highly detailed and demanding AAA experiences which capitalized on the novelty of VR. The Go meanwhile represents an intelligent pivot from traditional VR design philosophy, which often sacrifices accessibility for immersion. Oculus has set a new goal that focuses on adoption and onboarding as opposed to hardware brinkmanship. This trend is poised to continue as HTC and Lenovo’s standalone offerings populate higher price points on the market.
Sales of all three new standalone headsets through Q3-Q4 ‘18 will be crucial in gauging adoption rates over the next 5 years. We expect that global standalone revenues will grow from over $350 million in 2018 to $3.2 billion in 2022. This growth will be due in part to a previously untapped market that neither smartphone-based nor tethered headsets can serve: new users with no additional computing hardware. This factor will only become more compelling as content, hardware, and usability improve over time. The overall global VR industry will benefit from this growth as well; we anticipate it will grow from just under $9 billion in 2018 to $48 billion in 2022.
The impact of standalone headsets on the global VR market is becoming more and more apparent with the release of competing hardware from formidable foreign OEMs, such as the Lenovo Mirage Solo and HTC Vive Focus, each bringing with it it’s own development and distribution platforms. As new displays, sensors, and processors (such as the upcoming Snapdragon XR1 which is specially designed for low cost standalone headsets) begin to show up in subsequent iterations of standalone headsets, hardware markets will begin to expand to accomodate a much larger sector of this new, accessible form of virtual reality. Further insights into current and future VR markets can be found in the the semi-annual Virtual Reality Industry Report, published by Greenlight Insights in collaboration with Road to VR. The report contains forecasts and in-depth analysis on VR hardware and solutions, including standalone headsets such as Oculus Go.
Oculus has been on quite the hiring spree as of late, with over a hundred positions currently advertised on the company’s career website aimed at bringing hardware and software engineers into the Seattle area. Now, a report from real estate analysis firm BuildZoom estimates parent company Facebook has spent over $88 million in Redmond-based labs and office space for Oculus this year alone.
To arrive at the number, BuildZoom analyzed 180+ filed, issued, and finaled (inspection-passing) building permits for Oculus projects provided by the City of Redmond, which includes 11 buildings across the city—right in Microsoft’s backyard.
An additional 72,000 sqft (~6700 m²) and a 200,000 ft² (~18.500 m²) leased location in Redmond haven’t been counted in the overall estimation.
Overall, the firm maintains Facebook has spent more than $106 million on Redmond-based labs and offices since it began its expansion into the Seattle area back in July 2015, with the $88.3 million of it spent in 2018 so far.
Image courtesy BuildZoom
BuildZoom includes some healthy caveats in their estimations, which could put the final cost at a higher sum: building permits don’t reflect all of the project’s costs, and the quoted amounts are “minimum estimates and may not include permits for demolition work, temporary structures, FF&E, engineering, or other public infrastructure improvements.”
Additionally, the firm says the data “may not be exhaustive and is based on what has been made available by the City of Redmond, Washington.”
Speaking to Road to VR earlier this year regarding its recent VR/AR hiring spree, an Oculus spokesperson said this: “Overall, the growing number of job openings across AR and VR are an indication of the level of commitment that Facebook/Oculus is making in the VR space.”
So it appears Facebook is putting both feet forward as they continue investment in Oculus, bringing more dedicated VR/AR labs and offices to what’s quickly become America’s next big tech hub.
Speaking at an industry event last week, Valve offered an update on Steam, the company’s massive digital marketplace for PC games, including the continued growth the company has seen in the VR segment over the last year.
Speaking at the White Nights St. Petersburg 2018 conference last week, Valve’s Jan-Peter Ewert offered up fresh data insights into Steam, including some staggering numbers like the platform’s 43 million daily active users (up from 25 million the same time in 2016), and a staggering average of 180 games being released each week thanks to the company’s new ‘Direct’ approach which makes it easier for developers to get their projects onto Steam.
Among the fresh insights—which were captured by Twitter user Michael Kuzmin, as spotted by Reddit user ‘IE_5’—Jan-Peter noted that VR is an “ongoing investment,” and that the VR content landscape on Steam is a “thriving marketplace.” It was also shown that monthly active VR users on Steam are up 160% year-over-year.
Image courtesy Michael Kuzmin
Valve isn’t giving a hard figure on how many active VR headsets are on their platform, but we can work out a reasonable estimate. The challenge is finding a way to square the total number of daily active users on Steam (43 million, per these new figures), with the latest data in Steam’s Hardware & Software Survey (which is presented in terms of monthly active users). Well, we can determine the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users by comparing to a recent time that both figures were officially provided, then use that ratio to estimate the most recent monthly active users figure from the known daily active users figure, which comes out to an estimated 87.3 million monthly active users.
Given that—and knowing from the Steam Hardware & Software survey that 0.7% of monthly Steam users have a VR headset connected—we can reasonably estimate some 611,100 VR headsets were attached to PCs running Steam over the course of June 2018.
Of course, Steam isn’t the only VR platform out there—Oculus, PlayStation, and the Microsoft Store (not to mention mobile platforms) add still more to the total count of active VR users, but unfortunately we don’t have good figures to work with to determine monthly active VR users for those platforms.
Bloomberg reported this week that the $500 million penalty levied at Oculus in last year’s case brought by ZeniMax has been reduced to $250 million. A motion seeking to prevent sales of Oculus products using code attributed to ZeniMax has been rejected, according to the publication.
ZeniMax took Oculus to court after its acquisition by Facebook in 2014; the company alleged that Oculus stole intellectual property developed by Oculus’ now-CTO John Carmack back when he was employed by ZeniMax’ child company id Software. In the case’s initial verdict back in 2017, the jury awarded ZeniMax $500 million in damages, to be paid by Oculus and key employees. A detailed breakdown of the 2017 verdict is available here.
Citing court documents in the high profile ZeniMax v. Oculus case, Bloomberg reports that U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade this week cut down the penalties levied against Oculus company from $500 million to $250 million.
Oculus is still on the hook for $250 million for copyright infringement and breach of contract, as found by the jury, but an additional $250 million penalty for trademark infringement and false designation ($50M against Oculus, $150M against founder Brendan Iribe, and $50 million against founder Palmer Luckey) has been nullified.
According to the report, ZeniMax’s efforts to halt sales of the Oculus Rift and Gear VR (and ostensibly Oculus Go) headsets was rejected by the judge.
Back in 2016, at the E3 reveal of the Xbox ‘Project Scorpio’ (which would go on to become the company’s flagship Xbox One X), Microsoft said the console would bring “high fidelity VR” to Xbox. But after backpedaling from those plans, today marked the second E3 without a peep from the company about VR on the Xbox One X, even while touting a deep investment in the future of the platform, and continuing a VR push on its PC platform that’s isolated from Xbox.
Xbox head Phil Spencer capped off the company’s E3 presentation today with a bold glimpse of the future of Xbox technology and content:
In this significant moment, we are constantly challenging ourselves. Our answer? We commit and harness the full breadth of our resources at Microsoft to deliver on the future of play. Our experts in Microsoft research are developing the future of gaming AI, so the worlds and characters we enjoy will be even more rich and more immersive. Our cloud engineers are building a game-streaming network to unlock console quality gaming on any device. Not only that, we’re dedicated to perfecting your experience everywhere you want to play. On your Xbox, your PC, or your phone. And of course, our hardware team. The same team, that delivered unprecedented performance with Xbox One X, is deep into architecting the next Xbox consoles, where we will once again deliver on our commitment to set the benchmark for console gaming. And let’s talk about our games themselves. We are committed to building an industry leading first party studios organization. And as you saw earlier, we’re making one of our greatest single-year investments in teams by adding five new creative studios. We have committed our team, our company, our technical resources, so we can declare to you today, and next year, and all of the years after that: you will always experience the best in gaming on Xbox.
It’s been less than a year since Microsoft released the Xbox One X, and though it’s just a mid-cycle console refresh, it’s still surprising to hear the company already talking about future “consoles.” The question then, perhaps, is whether or not the Xbox One X will see VR introduced at some point during its lifecycle, or if Microsoft will wait until an entirely new console generation to bring VR to Xbox.
Back in 2016, at the E3 reveal of the Xbox ‘Project Scorpio’ (which would go on to become the company’s flagship Xbox One X), Microsoft said the console would bring “high fidelity VR” to Xbox. But after backpedaling from those plans, today marked the second E3 without a peep from the company about VR on the Xbox One X, even while touting a deep investment in the future of the platform, and continuing a VR push on its PC platform that’s isolated from Xbox.
Xbox head Phil Spencer capped off the company’s E3 presentation today with a bold glimpse of the future of Xbox technology and content:
In this significant moment, we are constantly challenging ourselves. Our answer? We commit and harness the full breadth of our resources at Microsoft to deliver on the future of play. Our experts in Microsoft research are developing the future of gaming AI, so the worlds and characters we enjoy will be even more rich and more immersive. Our cloud engineers are building a game-streaming network to unlock console quality gaming on any device. Not only that, we’re dedicated to perfecting your experience everywhere you want to play. On your Xbox, your PC, or your phone. And of course, our hardware team. The same team, that delivered unprecedented performance with Xbox One X, is deep into architecting the next Xbox consoles, where we will once again deliver on our commitment to set the benchmark for console gaming. And let’s talk about our games themselves. We are committed to building an industry leading first party studios organization. And as you saw earlier, we’re making one of our greatest single-year investments in teams by adding five new creative studios. We have committed our team, our company, our technical resources, so we can declare to you today, and next year, and all of the years after that: you will always experience the best in gaming on Xbox.
It’s been less than a year since Microsoft released the Xbox One X, and though it’s just a mid-cycle console refresh, it’s still surprising to hear the company already talking about future “consoles.” The question then, perhaps, is whether or not the Xbox One X will see VR introduced at some point during its lifecycle, or if Microsoft will wait until an entirely new console generation to bring VR to Xbox.
Beat Saber is one of the most popular VR games around. However, not only is the rhythm game popular for its base game and DLC tracks, but also for its huge custom map community.
There’s a wealth of great community maps available online, and with a little bit of tinkering you can start playing some fantastic custom maps in Beat Saber. Here’s our guide on how to get started.
The following guide is for the PC VR version of Beat Saber only. Modifying the game doesn’t seem to be possible on PSVR and the Oculus Quest has a very different process that changes regularly, depending on which tools are currently available.
This guide is up to date as of February 2021 for version 1.13.2 of Beat Saber. We’ll try to keep this guide up to date as much as possible, but sometimes it can be hard to keep up with all the patches and changes to the modding tools.
If you’re using a newer version of Beat Saber and this article hasn’t been updated, it’s likely that the process remains exactly the same. If not, let us know in the comments and keep an eye out for an update.
Tools and Sites
There are a bunch of different tools and sites you can use for Beat Saber modification. For the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll be using Mod Assistant for installation and first-time setup and the site Beast Saber to find and download custom maps.
Although we won’t cover it here, if you want to read up on an alternative for managing your custom maps, check out BeatDrop 2.
While we prefer using Mod Assistant to keep things simple, it is possible to manually download and install custom maps yourself, without any external tools. To see how, scroll to the bottom of this guide.
You might also need to know the install location of Beat Saber on your system. If you simply installed the game through Oculus or Steam on your standard C:// drive in the default location, then you shouldn’t need to worry. However, if you have your games installed in a custom location or you have multiple drives with different programs installed across them, you might want to locate your Beat Saber install folder location now (you should be able to use the Oculus app or Steam to find the location). In this instance, the folder you want to select is the one called ‘hyperbolic-magnetism-beat-saber’.
Also, make sure you’ve run/played Beat Saber at least once on your system before proceeding or installing any mods.
First Time Install
If you’ve never installed custom maps on your copy of Beat Saber, you’ll need to install some plugins and mods that enable third-party map support in-game. When Beat Saber updates, your custom maps may or may not be intact/enabled. For example, previous updates (such as going from 1.6 to 1.7 of Beat Saber) did not disable or remove any custom maps. However, patches and updates do have the potential to break mod support, so you’ll have to check on a case-by-case basis with each new update.
In this event, a new version of ModAssistant will be released to work with the new patch. As of the most recent 1.13 patch of Beat Saber, ModAssistant is up-to-date and should work with Beat Saber.
For future updates, there’s a chance you may have to repeat these steps again, perhaps with some changes to accommodate for a new patch.
To set up a first-time install or update your modded Beat Saber after a new patch:
1. Open up ModAssistant.exe and agree to the terms of use.
You don’t need to install Mod Assistant — you can place it anywhere and open it from wherever, whenever you want to use it.
If Mod Assistant can’t find you Beat Saber install folder, it will ask you to locate it. Point it toward the folder you located earlier, if so.
2. Open up the Mods tab.
When you open the mods tab, all of the prerequisite mods for custom maps should be automatically ticked. There are a whole bunch of others you can install, but for the purposes of this tutorial, just click the “Install or Update” button in the bottom right for now. You only need to install the basic, pre-selected mods to play and install custom maps.
NOTE: On the left hand side, you’ll see a drop down menu indicating your Beat Saber version. Sometimes, after an update, the latest release of Mod Assistant might not technically support the latest version of Beat Saber. In this case, Mod Assistant should warn you that your Beat Saber version is newer than what the program supports. It should also ask if you want to proceed anyway. In the past, we’ve successfully been able to proceed anyway and just continue the process with the most recent supported version of Beat Saber selected in Mod Assistant, even if it doesn’t completely match the version we have installed. While we didn’t run into any problems, this might vary on a patch-by-patch basis or might change in the future.
3. Wait for mods to finish installing.
Once mods are finished installing, you’re ready to install some custom maps.
Install Custom Maps
If you didn’t change any of the preset mod installs, then Mod Assistant should have installed a tool that will allow you to search for and install custom maps in-game. You can find this on the left hand side of the Beat Saber main menu next to release notes. There will be a tab reading “Mods”. Clicking on that tab will offer the option “More Songs”.
If you would rather install maps from your desktop and then hop into VR later to play them, go back to Mod Assistant and go the options tab. Under “Enable One Click Installs,” tick Beast Saber (You should only need to do this once, just to turn the feature on). Then, while browsing maps on Beast Saber, you can simply click the cloud-install button (pictured below) to install a map (you may need to be logged into Beast Saber, you can register a free account).
The cloud download button, third from the right, will install the maps from Beast Saber via Mod Assistant.
When you go to one-click install a map from Beast Saber, your browser might ask if you want to allow the site to open Mod Assistant — click yes. This will bring up a Mod Assistant window showing the install progress — it will say ‘Done’ when the install is complete.
After downloading and installing maps, either in-game or on your desktop, they should appear in-game under a custom songs tab. Go get slicing!
Installing Without Mods
Mod Assistant is an easy one-click solution when used with Beast Saber. However, if you’d rather avoid modding tools all together, you can manually install custom songs yourself without modifying Beat Saber at all.
Simply download your custom song from Beast Saber (or elsewhere), which should come as a ZIP file. Unzip it and copy the resulting folder. Navigate to your Beat Saber install location, and then go to Beat Saber_Data\CustomLevels. Paste the unzipped custom song folder into your Custom Levels folder and you’re good to go.
That should be everything you need to start installing custom maps on Beat Saber for PC VR. If you have any questions or problems, comment below and we’ll try our best to help you out.
This article was initially published in 2018 with a different, now outdated, process. This guide has been updated several times, most recently on the 15th of December 2020, to reflect current methods and remove outdated ones. If you’d like to see an archive of past methods and the previous article content, check out this archive post here.
What is happening with the VR industry? Is adoption and growth still on target to support a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of independent VR developers? Leading headset manufacturers have not been transparent in sharing any specific information, and analyst datum that’s been released hasn’t been a reliable or comprehensive source of information. So it’s been difficult to get an honest and candid assessment about the overall health and vibrancy of the virtual reality ecosystem. But there are a few companies who have some deeper insights into the VR ecosystem, and these are the independent VR development companies who have released best-selling VR titles.
There was a significant dropoff of sales of their second title from the first title, and so Unger has the experience of going from the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ on the Gartner Hype Cycle down into the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’. He expects that VR will turn the corner within the next couple of years, and that focusing on producing smaller experiences aimed at the VR Arcade market is a going to be one way for indies to survive this temporary winter in the VR market.
Unger says that headset sales are being used as the primary metric for success, however, as an independent VR studio they are more interested in looking at the active attachment rates when doing their own internal planning for the next couple of years. That is: how many VR consumers are using their VR headsets either every day or at least once a month, versus how many have bought a VR headset, but aren’t using it because the content hasn’t been compelling enough to keep them coming back?
Unger suggests that the active attachment rates are the more important metric, but none of the major platform players in the VR industry want to have a transparent and honest conversation as to how this ecosystem is growing, how to best track and promote growth, and reflecting on whether or not their strategies are working. Unger suggests that there’s a middle-tier of independent VR developers who have not received a lot of support from the major headset manufacturers, and even the mainstream press hasn’t been investing the time or interest in covering some of these non-AAA tier VR game experiences.
So I had a chance to catch up with Unger at GDC where we had a candid conversation about the state of the VR industry, why he thinks VR games may be in the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ (it could be in the slope of enlightenment for other VR industry verticals), and some of the things that major headset manufacturers and content funders can do to support this middle tier of VR development in order to have a more robust, healthy, and vibrant VR developer ecosystem.