Our only reliable source of VR adoption data has lost its peg to reality [UPDATED]

From UploadVR:

Recent anomalies in the Steam Hardware Survey’s VR section suggest it has become unreliable.

Companies like Meta, Valve, & HTC don’t reveal hardware sales figures. Historically the Steam Hardware Survey was the the most reliable indicator of PC VR’s adoption. The survey is offered to a random sample of Steam’s userbase each month. If you choose to accept, it uploads your PC specifications and peripherals. Before March 2020 the survey relied on headsets being connected via USB at the time of sampling, but Valve changed it to scan your SteamVR logs from the past month.

I had missed this change when it happened, and I suspect that a lot of other people were also unaware that the methodology had changed. This isn't the first time that Valve have made changes to the VR section of the Survey, though; the VR Survey results are the only ones which are presented with the detailed breakdown first, and only then states the overall value, "Steam users with VR Headsets."

VR has failed to thrive in the pandemic

This isn't how it was supposed to play out. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic's first wave gathered speed, and fortunate souls like me switched from meatspace commuting to tele-commuting, I started seeing more and more takes like this one, from CNBC:

Virtual reality is booming in the workplace amid the pandemic. Here’s why.

After years of promises and false starts, Covid-19 has driven a record number of workers remotely and could finally usher in their regular use of VR and AR at home — or at least give the tech a push on the path to mainstream.

A PwC report last year predicted that nearly 23.5 million jobs worldwide would be using AR and VR by 2030 for training, work meetings or to provide better customer service. According to a report by ABI Research this year, before the pandemic the VR market was forecasted to grow at a 45.7% compound annual rate, surpassing $24.5 billion in revenue by 2024. Virtual reality used within businesses is forecasted to grow from $829 million in 2018 to $4.26 billion in 2023, according to ARtillery Intelligence.

The alert among you will have already spotted the repeating pattern here: a click-bait headline that talks about a VR boom as if it's happening, then immediately follows with a sentence that only says that it could happen; and "analysts" with skin in the VR game, bullishly predicting that VR will grow into a multi-billion dollar business in the next five years, in a report published a year earlier, before the pandemic had even started. In short, a lot of speculation with no substance, breathlessly presented as if CNBC were reporting on something that was already happening.

We've been seeing this same pattern play out for years, in no small part because analysts like PwC have been making these same predictions for about five years now, without the predicted VR boom ever happening, but COVID-19 changed a lot of things. Did it change this one? Was this actually VR's hour, come round at last?

Steam continues to confound

If there's one thing about the OS market share numbers which has remained reliable from one month to the next, it's that Steam's numbers almost always move in the opposite direction from the OS market over all, and last month was no different. That's right -- Windows lost overall market share among Steam users, with MacOS and Linux both posting gains, all of which is backwards when compared to the broader OS marketplace.

As expected, Windows 10 continued to gain while other Windows versions lost ground, pretty much as one would expect given that gamers are the one group that continues to buy new PCs, all of which come with Win10 installed. I wasn't expecting MacOS and Linux to be gaining in popularity among Steam users, though; one can't help but wonder if Steam Play/Proton isn't playing a role there.

But I'll be honest: I have no real idea what this might mean, if anything. I'll keep watching, though, in the hope that some sort of clarity emerges from the statistical soup.

Watch this space...

Windows lost more Steam, too

In case you were still thinking that Windows' 0.83% user market share drop in December was some sort of an error, Steam's Software Survey has corroborated the decline, putting Steam in sync with the overall OS market for a second straight month.

Click to enlarge.

Once again, MacOS (a.k.a. OS X) and Linux were the big gainers, with MacOS 10.14 and Ubuntu 18.10 both showing strong results; the newbie-friendly Linux Mint, a distro that doesn't even register among OS users in the broader marketplace, appears to have gained a significant share among Steam users. Weirdly, only Windows 7's 64-bit version lost Steam users, with Win7's 32-bit version gaining ground alongside all other Windows versions except XP; Win7 64-bit's decline was enough to put Windows in the red overall, though, with a 0.58% overall drop which is only slightly slower than the decline seen in the overall OS market.

In isolation, this sort of behaviour among Steam users could be interpreted as resulting from Valve's Steam Play/Proton initiative, but given that Windows' decline among Steam users is actually less than that seen in the larger OS market, it's difficult to describe this as anything other than just a part of the overall trend, with Windows-dependent PC gamers actually lagging slightly behind everyone else. Whether Steam Play/Proton changes those users' decision-making calculus in the coming months is, of course, anyone's guess. It does seem to be making it somewhat easier for gamers to join the shift away from Windows, though, meaning that Microsoft shouldn't be counting too hard on PC gamers to be a backstop against the overall loss of Windows users.

Denial of Virtual Reality

I spotted this accidental juxtaposition in a Google search for VR news, and it couldn't have been more perfect. First, from RoadToVR:

A Road to VR analysis of the latest data from Valve’s Steam Hardware & Software shows that VR users on Steam have not only been growing, but are at their highest point in history.

First generation VR hardware may not yet have had its mass adoption moment, but pundits claiming the end is near for VR are overlooking strong evidence against their claims. Not only has the tech fostered a strong enthusiast community, but that group continues to grow. In fact, in November there were more VR users on Steam than ever before.

And then, from The VR Soldier:

Although there are still four weeks in the year 2018, VR-related forecasts are not looking great. Research by CCS Insight confirms there will be a total of eight million headsets to be sold throughout 2018. This number combines both VR and AR units, which further confirms the VR industry itself may face a bigger uphill battle than originally assumed.

This total figure is down by 20% compared to 2017. While one would assume sales figures to rise as more content is produced, the opposite is coming true. Further growth will occur in 2019 and beyond, according to the research. CCS Insight confirms 52 million units will be sold in 2022. Whether that favors VR or AR, is difficult to predict at this time.

I couldn't have planned a more perfect rebuttal.

The percentage of VR headset owners increased by 0.05% of Steam's total user base, with only HTC Vive and Oculus Rift showing growth that registered as more than 0.00% on the Steam Hardware Survey. Multiplied by Steam's 125 million users, that's about 62,500 headsets sold... in November, which is one of the two busiest sales months of the year.

Even Black Friday couldn't shift VR's market momentum.

The 0.78% of Steam's total users who have VR or AR headsets, by the by, similarly approximate to 975K total headsets, worldwide, since VR's launch two years ago, and to get even that high, you have to include Oculus Rift's two developer kits, which are almost certainly not in the hands of average consumers. Which must mean that the "eight million headsets" cited by The VR Soldier includes non-SteamVR users, also, like PlayStationVR, GearVR, and, presumably, Google Cardboard.

That's not enough to support any platform, and VR is a platform; headset sales need to pick up sharply, and soon, if this round of either VR or AR hardware is going to be anything other than a footnote in tech history.

Needless to say, I think that's unlikely.

Windows is losing Steam

It looks like the downward trend in Windows' overall market share is also being mirrored in Steam's software survey numbers, as reported by Phoronix:

Valve has published their latest monthly Steam survey data, which shows an increase in the Linux gaming population.

For November 2018, Steam's Survey reports a 0.80% marketshare for Linux, which is a 0.08% increase over October, which was on an upward trend following the roll-out of Steam Play late this summer for allowing Windows-only games to run more easily on Linux with their Wine-based Proton software... Earlier this year it was around just 0.5% Linux marketshare and last year there were the lows of around 0.3%.

While 0.80% may not seem like much, it's significant when factoring in the size of Steam's customer base that is reportedly at 125+ million users. 

Not only is Linux up, MacOS is also up, and Windows is down, in a rare case of Steam users actually trending in the same direction as the market overall.

There's a lot of overlap between Steam's user base and the PC gaming community overlap, and their higher Windows 10 adoption rate, and higher PC purchasing rate, were helping to drive Windows 10's numbers upwards. Windows 10 is still pushing out Windows 7 among PC gamers, but with more PC gamers shifting from Windows to Mac OS X and Linux because of Steam Play, this shift among the most active PC purchasers could be a significant driver of the overall market shift away from Linux.

Importantly, MacOS X and Steam are both consumer-driven market segments, which could mean that Microsoft is losing consumers to both Apple and FOSS. Back in July, Microsoft had talked about their desire to win back consumers with Modern Life Services. We've heard nothing about that consumer-focused initiative since, and if this trend in Windows' market share is any indication, Microsoft's time could be starting to run out. Windows has a healthy lead in PC gaming, though, with a 96.00% market share, so there's still time for Microsoft to react... if they start now.

Tick, tock, Microsoft. Your move.

English & Windows 10 gain some Steam

The Steam Hardware & Software Survey for January is out, and it would seem that the Steam community has finally stopped bucking the overall OS market trend: WX's share of Steam users is up, and substantially, from last month, even as Windows' overall share of Steam declined in favour of MacOS:

Interestingly, W7's losses to WX track pretty closely with another trend that Steam Survey watchers have been keeping an eye on in recent months: the rise (and now fall) of Simplified Chinese as Steam users' language of choice:

The last few months' surge in Steam market share of both W7 and Chinese had been attributed to the surging popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) in China.

PUBG is still the top-selling game on Steam, a position that it's now held for nearly a year, and it's unlikely that we'd have heard anything about declining PUBG concurrency numbers, since attention tends to be paid only when concurrency records are being broken, but it's possible that PUBG's popularity has finally cooled the slightest little bit, allowing market norms to reassert among Steam's users. Keep an eye peeled in the coming weeks for stories about PUBG "dying," though, since the other thing that media outlets of all types love is a good "falling from grace"narrative.

Still, it looks like WX is finally starting to climb back towards parity with W7 among Steam users, even as Windows overall loses users to OS X, which is exactly what we see in the broader OS market, too. For a change. This is just one month's data, though, and you know what they say about once being a freak occurrence; I'll want to see three months' of consecutive WX gains in the Steam Software Survey before I'll call this a real trend.

There's no denying that these numbers fit with the overall trend, though. We'll just have to wait and see if the trend continues into next month, or if WX starts to eat into W7's overall market share more in coming months than it's done to date.

Windows 10 continues to lose Steam

Continuing a tradition that's been going for a while now, Steam's user base continues to run contrary to the overall OS market. Just like last month, while Windows 10 continues to make slow gains in the OS market overall, Steam's users seem to be switching back to Windows 7 at a brisk pace, according to the Steam Survey for the end of September.

Interestingly, all versions of Windows except 64-bit Win7 declined last month. Presumably the shift from Win10 to Win7 would be linked to recent revelations about the way that Windows 10's Game Mode actually breaks games; it's less clear why users would be switching from 64-bit Win8 and 8.1 to 64-bit Win7 now, since none of those Windows versions has changed significantly for years.

The nascent Linux Shift is missing here, too. Why is Ubuntu 16.04 gaining market share, while the newer 17.04 sheds users? Why is Linux slumping overall among gamers, but gaining market share rapidly on a global level?

Part of the answer could lie in the nature of the Steam Survey itself: it's a voluntary survey, whose respondents are basically self-selecting, rather than a random sampling of the overall marketplace (which is what NetMarketShare and StatCounter are doing). Survey sampling bias may well be at play here, and the Steam Survey numbers should always be taken with a grain of salt.