Valve’s Index VR headset is now greater than 4 years previous. Regardless of its age, the headset continued to promote at a stunning fee over time—however as they are saying, nothing lasts without end.
Valve launched Index with the purpose of setting the bar for PC VR headsets to beat. And by many measures it completed that purpose. Regardless of the $1,000 price ticket and the headset’s age, Index stays the second most-used headset on Steam at 18.38% of energetic headsets on the platform (although a distant second to Quest 2 at 42.05%) as of June 2023. Even with only one headset, that makes Valve the second largest headset vendor on the platform.
Regardless of PC VR headsets which have launched since with larger decision or OLED shows or perhaps a cheaper worth, the headset’s steadiness of consolation, visuals, sound, monitoring, and controllers have made it a preferred alternative lengthy after its spec sheet would counsel.
Whereas utilization of Index stays sturdy, gross sales of the headset look like in decline after years of holding regular.
Though Valve doesn’t share how a lot income particular person merchandise make on its platform, Steam does rank the highest promoting merchandise, by income, every week. Due to SteamDB’s archive of the data, we’ve been in a position to get a tough development of the headset’s gross sales efficiency over time.
The information is at instances sparse; for a lot of the dataset we solely know the highest 10 merchandise by weekly income (if Index fell beneath the highest 10 we don’t know precisely how far it fell), however Steam lately started sharing the highest 100, giving us a clearer perception into the downward development of Index gross sales.
The precise motive for the considerably sudden change in development is unclear, however now we have one speculation. The downturn started taking place some six to eight months after Valve launched Steam Deck—the corporate’s first {hardware} product since Index. The flip additionally got here across the new yr heading from 2022 into 2023.
Particularly contemplating that precise utilization of the headset stays sturdy, our greatest guess is that gross sales of Index have trended downward largely as a result of Valve has shifted the highlight to Steam Deck; probably much more so after the corporate noticed how nicely the machine offered by means of the 2022 vacation season.
Whereas Valve had as soon as promoted Index in varied locations on the Steam storefront, now Steam Deck seems extra usually to be put in entrance of Steam’s large viewers of customers:
Valve might even have reallocated a few of its Index manufacturing capability to satisfy demand for Steam Deck.
Its tough to say what this implies for Index and Valve’s future VR {hardware} ambitions. There’s little question that the introduction of standalone headsets has modified the VR panorama significantly in comparison with when Index first launched. There have been glimpses that Valve remains to be engaged on one thing behind the scenes, however the firm’s restricted consideration could also be largely centered on Steam Deck for the foreseeable future.