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The Half-Life effect on PC-VR is the biggest Steam has ever seen
On Friday, Valve revealed the biggest jump ever in virtual reality use on its SteamVR platform: a 0.62 percent increase of all Steam users. This jump between March and April 2020, unsurprisingly, coincides with the first Steam Hardware Survey to include players of the megaton VR exclusive Half-Life: Alyx.
If that percentage tally sounds ridiculously low, remember that the last public announcement of all Steam users came in January 2019, at a count of 90 million. That number has likely grown quite a bit since then, owing to factors like free-to-play games attracting more users over that 15-month span. If we agree with estimates like Road to VR's count of roughly 141 million Steam users in April 2020 (as determined by an exponential trendline with an r-squared factor of 0.922), then that "0.62 percent increase" would mean a one-month jump of over 870,000 active VR users.
[...] These survey results could have played out differently if Valve and Oculus alike hadn't struggled to keep up with VR headset sales demand; both companies' flagship VR systems have been sold out or back-ordered at major retailers for months, particularly while anticipation for Half-Life: Alyx began mounting. As of press time, it's still impossible to buy systems from either company directly from their site and expect immediate shipment; Oculus lists nothing but "sold out" notices for all of its kits, while Valve lists a minimum wait of eight weeks for any Index-affiliated hardware.
The increase was from 1.29% of all Steam users in March to 1.91% in April.
Related: Every Classic Half-Life Game is now Free on Steam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 06 2020, @03:28PM (2 children)
i got a 3.6 Ghz hexacore (2011 socket t-hehehe), 16 Ram, 1080 Gtx and HTC vive so it should run ok but i was a bit put off by the required M$ tax (windblows X).
will alynx also work on win7?
also, god damn, we got that linux/debian based steamOS thing and i really thought that m$ making win7 obsolete would open the door for VR to finally be officially supported with a 1-click install on steamOS?
also why is the HTC vive steamVR thingy driver whatnot on github for ubuntu when steam OS is debian based?
guess i jumped ship hoping to land on a steam powered paradise island only to land in jaw$ Xs ...errr... jaws?
*sigh* ... protons pretty cool tho, thanks for that.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 06 2020, @03:33PM
They say yes to Win7:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/546560/discussions/0/2137462524932930918/ [steamcommunity.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Snospar on Thursday May 07 2020, @07:31AM
The Valve Index is (I think) the only VR headset with decent Linux support and according to this article [gamingonlinux.com] the native Linux version of Half Life: Alyx is on the way. Shame it wasn't available at launch but better late than never. The number of games that run flawlessly in Proton is getting bigger every day and even recent titles like Wreckfest run without any issues and no appreciable performance degradation.
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