A VR headset that is powerful, comfortable, rather cheap and has the good taste of being able to work autonomously, it was enough for sales to soar.
Like every month, Steam publishes a " state of the PC market ". In fact, it's a question of the dematerialized games platform taking stock of the PC configurations used by players who connect to its service. The thing requires the consent of the main interested parties and can therefore not represent an exact photograph of the installed base of machines. Nevertheless, the volunteers are particularly numerous and we can still draw some conclusions, some trends.
The main results of the Steam study in January 2021
For example, as has been the case for several years now, the Steam study highlights the rise of AMD in the CPU field. Once crushed by Intel's domination, this segment is gradually rebalancing. Today, AMD effectively represents 27.99% of the market when its share was only 19.2% in August 2019 for example. An AMD that is for the time being less successful in the GPU market, still largely dominated by NVIDIA, which has kept around 75% market share for several years. AMD could have progressed, but the shortage around the Radeon RX 6000 series - even worse than that of the GeForce RTX 3000 series - has not allowed anything like that.
Finally, while there is a lot of other interesting information to be gleaned from this study, we would like to emphasize one particular point: virtual reality headsets. Indeed, launched since October 2020, the Oculus Quest 2 - lighter, more powerful and more versatile than most of its competitors - tends to put everyone in agreement. It's obviously taking advantage of the new VR craze that followed the launch of Half-Life Alyx last April. In the space of two months, the Oculus Quest 2 has risen to the second most used headset on Steam. With 17.4% market share, it now surpasses the Valve Index and is right on the heels of its "compatriot" the Oculus Rift S. Above all, it is the only one among the market tenors to gain market share, proof that it is literally eating its competitors.
