Half-Life: Alyx boosts VR and Steam: Nearly 1 million users added since launch

As predicted by many, Half-Life:Alyx seems to be turning out to be quite the killer app for VR. According to Road to VR, their analysis of current and historical data from Valve shows Steam added 950,000 new VR headsets over the past month, taking the total number of Steam users with VR headsets to 2.7 million (1.91% of all Steam users).

This spike in VR adoption is triple the previous highest monthly count of new VR users (seen over the December 2019 holiday season). How accurate these figures are is unknown, though, as Road to VR cautions that they have no details on how many of these 950,000 headsets are actually new additions or are older headsets that have been connected to Steam after a month’s gap.

Oculus Quest gains in popularity

Of individual headset models, the standalone Oculus Quest (which can be connected to PCs via a cable) has shown the biggest gains. Overall, Oculus remains the most popular VR platform on Steam,, with a 44.6% share. HTC is second, with a 30.3% slice of the market, followed by Valve (11.9%), and Windows Mixed Reality (8.5%).

Meanwhile, as the VR headset data shows, Half-Life: Alyx has been doing quite well on the charts. It was ranked amongst the top-20 selling games on Steam in March, no mean feat considering this is a VR-only title. It also ranks amongst the top new releases on game review aggregator Metacritic, with a Metascore of 93 and a user rating of 9.1.

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