Venture Beat look at VR Adoption Rates and it's really not looking good

[Bouzoo]

1 hour ago, Sakkura said:

Due to rounding issues, that can still hide a growth rate of up to 5-10%. Just getting the dial to move from 0.18% to 0.19% takes a few thousand headsets. Then you add the fact that the Steam hardware survey is a survey, so it only actually measures a small sample of users. Meaning the number gets inaccurate for small minorities like this (just like opinion polls have difficulty telling whether a political party will land 1.5% or 2.5% of the vote).

 

Also, your numbers are wrong. The survey currently says the Vive is at 0.18%, the Rift CV1 is at 0.1%, and the Rift DK2 is at 0.02%. The DK1 is too low to reach 0.01% (another example of the rounding and sampling issues, there are more than zero DK1s out there). Adding those numbers, the total VR adoption currently stands at 0.3% - three times as much as you claim.

0.1% of 150 million is 150K, not 15K.

 

Snip

Ops, typo. Tnx

[qwertywarrior]

im just waiting until the panels become good

 

4k Full RGB stripe

[Trustadz]

I'm still not convinced on the whole VR thing. You need a "game" room which isn't to cluttered. This is one of the reasons why the Nintedo Wii didn't go that good. Sure it sold a lot (from my memory it did better then the PS3 or Xbox 360, but could be wrong). However i've seen a LOT dusted Wii's. The concept was cool, the execution was stinky. Sure, the amount of good games on the wii was also shit and VR is different in that perspective. But I game and work on the same PC. I don't intent to change that. I also do not have the room for VR even if I had the money.

 

I don't think VR will ever be a replacement, but more of a nice addition. I'm not sure how much support there will be. Right now it's cool to say "Supports VR". So was 3D back in the good 'ol 'Avatar' days.

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, Sakkura said:

You did make claims outside of the quote boxes. Like this at the beginning:

 

Rift usage did not increase by 0.3% in July and 0.1% in August.

 

According to the survey, it actually increased by 0.03 percentage points in July, and 0.01 percentage points in August. This corresponds to a growth of 50% in July and 11% in August. So your numbers there were ten times too high if you meant percentage points, or waaay too low if you meant percent.

 

The same problem applies for the July figures for the Vive, but in August, zero is zero. However, as I explained, there's still some room for actual growth that is just too small to make the figures tick over. The survey truncates the percentages at the 2nd decimal. So 0.18% can actually mean anything from 0.175% to 0.184999...%. That difference of 0.00999...% is around 15K units.

 

And as I pointed out, the total number of Steam users who have VR is 0.30% according to the survey, not 0.10%. Meaning there are at least around half a million VR headsets out there already, if not considerably more (since some may not be hooked up to the PC when the survey pops up, and a few people might be relying on Oculus Home instead of Steam).

Thats not a claim, thats simply me paraphrasing the data in the article which I am obliged to do if I wish to post in the news section.

Quote

The number of new HTC Vive owners on Steam grew only 0.3 percent in July and was flat in August, according to a survey (via Reddit) of customers that use Valve’s distribution network. The Oculus Rift headset from the Facebook subsidiary saw similar stagnation of 0.3 percent in July and 0.1 percent in August.

Like I told you already, I didn't claim anything nor did I do the math so your beef is with the person who did. Don't shoot the messenger.

 

Jesus man, let it go. I mean 5% of a small amount is still a smaller amount no matter which way you try and spin it.

[Sauron]

Not surprising, with 700 bucks being the entry level on top of a very beefy rig and very few dedicated games only diehard supporters of the technology are going to buy a headset. Besides, when I tried it I wasn't too impressed - it's clearly not ready yet. The resolution is pretty low, the bezels interfere with the immersion and it's cumbersome to wear. And of course the low game variety doesn't help. I'm content with surround monitors for the time being.

[samcool55]

Well unless something is done to the price this won't change.

The early adopters have a headset by now and it's too expensive atm to become mainstream.

 

Also i think the reason adoption is so low is that vive is the only one atm with a room-scale vr experience.

Now the world knows that, most users want that so it doesn't suprise me sitting VR experiences like the rift or OSVR aren't so interesting anymore.

 

So unless other companies step up their game and release a competitor for the room-scale VR experience, i don't expect anything to change.

 

Or the Vive should get newer versions and get cheaper just for the sake of adoption rate because if nothing changes there is 0 pressure from competitors.

[Sakkura]

23 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Thats not a claim, thats simply me paraphrasing the data in the article which I am obliged to do if I wish to post in the news section.

Like I told you already, I didn't claim anything nor did I do the math so your beef is with the person who did. Don't shoot the messenger.

 

Jesus man, let it go. I mean 5% of a small amount is still a smaller amount no matter which way you try and spin it.

 

5% of a small amount may be a small amount, but we're talking about growth rates of as much as 50% being turned into 0.3%. That's a big difference.

[Sakkura]

27 minutes ago, Trustadz said:

I'm still not convinced on the whole VR thing. You need a "game" room which isn't to cluttered.

You can sit down in a chair and do VR just fine.

[Misanthrope]

1 hour ago, qwertywarrior said:

im just waiting until the panels become good

 

4k Full RGB stripe

Also rims. Gotta have rims fam.

 

But seriously yeah if we wait until Titan X Pascal levels of performance are available at mainstream prices (I suspect 2018 the earliest) then yeah I'd be affordable enough.

 

Still doesn't gets over the fact that there's just no decent games for VR and without a solid install base there won't be. It almost looks like companies investing in VR basically just want to go back to 2006 and ride the Wii lightning success making it strike again for them somehow. That's just never gonna happen.

[Sakkura]

5 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Also rims. Gotta have rims fam.

 

But seriously yeah if we wait until Titan X Pascal levels of performance are available at mainstream prices (I suspect 2018 the earliest) then yeah I'd be affordable enough.

 

Still doesn't gets over the fact that there's just no decent games for VR and without a solid install base there won't be. It almost looks like companies investing in VR basically just want to go back to 2006 and ride the Wii lightning success making it strike again for them somehow. That's just never gonna happen.

There are decent games for VR. Just not that many.

 

Damaged Core is a pretty cool shooter. Elite Dangerous, House of the Dying Sun + maybe a couple other good space games. Solus Project and Subnautica for exploration or survival gameplay, as well as Minecraft of course. Fantastic Contraption if you want to build machines and seem them fail spectacularly. Chronos for your 3rd person RPG needs. Dirt Rally and a few other regular racing games are cool in VR, and there are also a couple of zero-G racing games. Lucky's Tale if you're into platformers.

 

The list of good games is short, but it'll keep growing.

 

And some companies are investing in VR. Oculus has been funding devs for a while, and now Sony's doing the same (on a larger scale, probably, but with more restrictions as well).

[Trustadz]

6 hours ago, Sakkura said:

You can sit down in a chair and do VR just fine.

Not as immersive as an actual game room where you can walk. I also understood that the Vive needs an area, but can be wrong in that part.

[AlexGoesHigh]

Of course price is the reason, both headsets have low numbers because of it, though we don't know the number of units produced, for all we could now those 100k vives in the wild could be almost all of them made so far with little sitting on a warehouse waiting for a purchase, besides when they went on sale both the Vive and Rift had production issues, and the Rift had to cope with them for months post release.

[hph6203]

3 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Yeah, no it doesn't. It wasn't my opinion nor was it even my own words, it was a paraphrase of someone else's words.

 

I get it Sakkura, I really do. You are an early adopter and your salty because the tech you love is failing hard so your looking for a patsy to take it out on. Unfortunately for you I have shown you proof 3 times now that that patsy is not me, if you wish to ignore that FACT then thats fine, I can't make you accept it but that doesn't change the end result any.

 

For the last time now, I paraphrased the article (which is a requirement to post in the news section), I didn't write the article, I didn't do the math, I didn't claim anything. I posted a news story written by someone else, that's it. The fact you don't like what it says is not my problem and if you carry on accusing me of deliberately twisting facts then I am going to report you.

You posted an article with a bad interpretation of bad data, and then made a value judgement based upon that bad data and bad interpretation. You can't make an accurate assessment of the VR market based upon this data, and the assessment that was made in the article is flat out wrong even based upon the bad data given. You're responsible for that.

 

I have no dog in this fight, but Sakkura is educating you on how to analyze your bad data, and you're taking it as a personal attack (as an aside, you cannot assume that .28% of Steam users have VR headsets, only that there is a total number of headsets equivalent to .28% assuming that the survey is representative of the whole, there is bound to be overlap and my guess would be there's a lot of it). You, and the article do not understand statistics, or didn't put in the effort to understand these statistics.

 

Assuming a Steam market of 125,000,000 users, that the Steam market is a perfect analog for the VR market and if Oculus sold .1% of that market per month since launch, you and this article would be talking about "only" a .1% increase month over month, but in reality Oculus would have sold 625,000 headsets and they'd be burning the fucking building down about how successful it had been.

 

 

Is the VR market going crazily well? No. Is it falling flat on its face? Can't tell from this data. There have been projections all over the place on how many headsets would be sold, and the best way for you to accurately benchmark whether VR is doing well or not is by looking at each individual manufacturer's expectations versus the reality at this point. That data isn't present here. My guess is that it is lagging behind projections, but may get a bump after Playstation VR launches. We'll have a much better idea of how VR is doing by the new year, today it is too early to tell, because all the players aren't present and we haven't gotten to the silly season of money spending (Black Friday/Christmas etc.).

[ThinkWithPortals]

On 07/09/2016 at 9:50 PM, Master Disaster said:

Vive did even worse with 0.3% in July & 0% in August. Yep the Vive had ZERO new adopters on Steam in August. 

I don't think that's true. I think there were just so few that the system rounded the percentage down to 0.

 

Anyway, I've said it before, but I truly don't believe that VR is the best big thing like people say.

[Thony]

On 07/09/2016 at 5:01 PM, Daniel644 said:

price is definitely a factor, but some folks are also waiting for the OTHER headsets to show up, Like StarVR and a commercial version of OSVR (not development kit) to see how they compare. Some folks are waiting to see how PSVR turns out on the Neo, while others are waiting for benchmarks before buying a graphics to see how well what cards run VR and some are simply saving up still, but yeah the "early adopter phase is over.

Its pretty obvious Oculus and Vive provide best experience and all the other stuff will either be similar or cheaper (worse experience).

So those waiting (PC gamers) are less than 0.05%.... 

 

Rest of population is waiting for console VR from Sony and Microsoft. There is no way the quality will match Oculus or Vive but there will be much more games and things to do. 

 

The cost of the headset is the only factor making people not buy this gen and hope next generstions get lot better for less money (perfect world scenario...)

[Beskamir]

If I could get a Rift for less then 400 or even 300 bucks I'd absolutely get one.

[Snadzies]

Not surprising in the least.

It is a peripheral with peripherals that costs as much or more than the PC you need to run it if you want the full setup (and you need a reasonably powerful PC) with rather limited use.

 

Nintendo it one of the biggest peripheral junkies with decades and dozens of peripherals and if they haven't had any that have really taken off and found any long term success I'm not going to put much faith into these VR headsets finding success.