Valve Index VR headset sales decline, the evergreen tree that has been on the market for four years is gradually losing its luster

IT House reported on July 16 that Valve’s Index VR headset is a high-end PC VR device, launched in 2019, priced at US$1,000 (IT House note: currently about 7,150 yuan). Although it is expensive and has a history of four years, this headset has maintained an amazing sales momentum. It is the second most used VR headset on the Steam platform (second only to Quest 2), and it also makes Valve It has become the second largest head display manufacturer on the platform.

Index VR headsets have won the favor of many players with their comfortable wearing feel, excellent visual effects, excellent sound, precise tracking and innovative controllers, even if higher resolutions and cheaper prices later appeared Or competing products using OLED displays have not shaken its position.

However, in recent months, sales of Index VR headsets have shown a clear trend of decreasing. Although Valve did not release specific sales data, we can roughly see how this headset performs in the market through the product sales rankings (calculated by revenue) released by Steam every week. Judging from the data collected by the SteamDB website, the Index VR headset has been firmly in the top ten in the past few years, and sometimes even entered the top three. However, from the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023, its sales began to gradually decline, and the amplitude was still very large. Big, it even fell out of the top 90 recently.

There may be many reasons for this change, and the decline occurs exactly six to eight months after Valve released the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck, Valve's first hardware product since the Index VR headset, is a portable gaming console that can run games on the Steam platform. Valve likely sees a bigger opportunity, as the device is selling like hotcakes during the late 2022 holiday season. Therefore, Valve may be putting more effort and resources into the Steam Deck, and may even be diverting some production capacity from the Index VR headset to meet the needs of the Steam Deck. Meanwhile, Valve is promoting the Steam Deck more on the Steam platform than the Index VR headset.

Of course, another possible reason is that Meta’s Quest 3 headset will be available this fall, and many users may choose to wait for this new headset.

There’s no way of knowing what this means for the Index VR headset, as well as Valve’s future VR hardware plans. There's no doubt that the VR market has changed a lot since the release of the Index VR headset, especially with the advent of standalone VR headsets (that don't need to be connected to a computer or phone). While there are signs that Valve is still working on some new projects behind the scenes, the company will likely keep its focus on the Steam Deck for the foreseeable future.

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