What makes people put on a VR headset?
In the VR industry there is an interest in trying to increase sales and usage of VR headsets. Some see that the supposed "Metaverse" will be intertwined with VR. Some see VR as the future of gaming. Both of those subjects are debatable and laying out my thoughts on that is a subject for a different blog post. But for the sake of this exploration let's just assume VR is the future, which would beg the question, "What makes people put on a VR headset?"
When I hear about stats or popularity of supposed "Metaverses" there tends to be no differentiating statistics between screen-based users and VR-based users. People point to the huge popularity of screen-based games like Fortnite or Roblox and automatically assume this will transfer into a highly popular VR-based "Metaverse".
Then commonly used terms heavily conflate things that are radically different. For example, the term "Avatar" typically clumps together Twitter icons, Fortnite characters and virtual bodies you wear in VR. Then the term "XR" typically clumps together VR headsets and mobile phone AR.
Conflating aspects that are screen-based and VR-based I think is an error in this endeavor because the mediums are so different. It should be expected that the type of content and experience which becomes predominate on each will also be comparably different. If you're trying to understand the VR-based world through screen-based mentalities, you're probably just going to miss it entirely.
First let's look at some data. Here are the most popular titles by CCU on Steam, these are all screen-based titles:
Steam Charts - Tracking What's Played - April 3, 2022
For those unfamiliar, CCU means Concurrent User Count, which refers to the number of users online at the same exact time. Daily Average Users (DAU) tends to be 5x-10x the CCU, then Monthly Active Users (MAU) tends to be 5x-10x the DAU.
Now looking at the above chart. Counterstrike, a first-person shooter, reigns in the #1 position. Then all the other titles are either shooters or hack n' slash gameplay mechanics. Notice all of the most popular games are violent action games.
It should be noted that Fortnite maintains CCU in the millions. So, if you included Epic Game Store this list would have an even higher proportion of CCU shifted towards another violent shooter title in the #1 position.
Next, let's look at the most popular games on SteamVR based on CCU of players in actual VR headsets:
Virtual Reality Titles (steampowered.com) - April 3, 2022
Ignoring the "Utilities" such as OVR Toolkit, XSOverlay and fpsVR, as those are not actual games, let's go down this list of the most popular VR titles by CCU.
First, I want to highlight, how can Gorilla Tag, a game where you play tag as a colorful cartoon gorilla, that looks like the screenshot to the right, sit alongside something like Pavlov, the VR equivalent of Counter-Strike? A game like Gorilla Tag would never be anywhere near the same position as Counter-Strike in the screen-based game charts.
There is something odd here compared to the popular screen-based titles.
If you were trying to anticipate what would be popular in VR based on what was popular on screen-based mediums, you would expect something like Pavlov, the VR equivalent of Counterstrike, to be #1. Yet Pavlov is #5. You would in the least expect a violent action title to be #1, but the first violent action game is #3.
The entire violent shooter and hack n' slash genre that unanimously reigns as the most popular on a screen is not the most popular in a VR headset. Why!?
Here is another oddity. These are the actual CCU counts of the two most popular titles VRChat and Beat Saber over time.
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VRChat - Steam Charts - Beat Saber - Steam Charts - April 3, 2022
VRChat oscillates between 20k-30k CCU, which you can estimate to over 1 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) for Steam. Then Beat Saber oscillates between 0.5k and 2k CCU on Steam. This means the #1 title can be as much as 10x more popular than the second most popular title. There is a significant proportion of CCU shifted towards VRChat in that list.
One thing to note, those VRChat Steam CCU stats include both screen-based and VR-based users. Based on the most recent comments from VRChat in 2020 there is reason to believe over 50% of users are in VR headsets. That percentage appears accurate based on my observations as well. That percentage was also growing, so it is probably even higher now in 2022 as VR headsets on Steam are starting to curve up exponentially. Even with only half of the CCU in VR headsets that still gives VRChat roughly 5x the CCU of users in actual VR headsets over the #2 title and everything else in that list.
Also notice VRChat's gradual increase in CCU over time, which is typically a positive sign in game analytics, as it shows natural retention and that you can expect further growth. While Beat Saber's CCU over time is pretty much flat.
Both Pavlov VR and Blade & Sorcery have similar dismal analytics. They are a fraction of the popularity of VRChat and they also have poor long-term growth curves.
This is all to illustrate that the type of game which would traditionally be by far the most popular runaway success on a screen actually struggles to compete in a VR headset. Why?!
Because VR is different from a screen.
This isn't that crazy of a statement. Just the input on an iPhone being multi-touch rather than a controller was enough of a change to the medium that it informed a different kind of game to dominate the charts. It is obvious to us now that you would not conflate iPhone users with Xbox users in analyzation and extrapolations.
Changes to the medium change the nature of the content that is good on that medium. You have to pay attention to the nature of the medium itself to extrapolate where it is going.
What this means is if your understanding of the future of XR or the Metaverse does not carry a distinct separation between screen-based users and VR-based users, it is probably not correct. There is no reason to assume that what works on a screen, what is desirable on a screen, will also be what is desirable in a VR headset.
Yet I have seen so many opinion pieces, articles and analyzations that have no distinction between screen-based users and VR-based users. I've seen articles proclaim screen-based content like Fortnite or Roblox are leading the way in a supposed VR Metaverse. But really, to accurately understand this, there needs to be more analysis on the differences between the mediums.
All of my articles try to bring attention to things which I see as unique to the medium of VR. I would point to other things I have already wrote.
Or better yet, buy a VR headset and start to regularly use it. VR as a whole is still in such an early stage that I personally don't believe necessary perspective can be formed entirely off of data. It's necessary to approach it more like an explorer and cartographer, where you observe, document and map based on your experience traversing it. Those experiencing it will lead it.
But to give you one major difference I see, the sense of immersion that VR creates changes everything. People like playing a violent shooter game, people like to watch people fight violent battles. However, it is far less appealing to actually be on a violent battlefield having to dodge bullets, duck, jump, move around, have people yelling at you and attacking you. There is a huge difference between things people like to watch and things people like to be. The difference between screen-based content and VR-based content plays heavily onto that dynamic. Due to the immersiveness of VR it makes people tend much more towards what they prefer to be rather than what they prefer to watch.
I think this will only exacerbate as VR further develops. To get a truly immersive VR experience right now you need to spend thousands of dollars on a PC VR setup. The Valve Index still is one of the best. The Oculus Quest 2 can get people pretty far for a much lower price tag. But still, the level of immersion capable with current technology is early. As each year passes and the VR hardware gets more advanced, more commoditized and capable of greater immersion, the nature of the medium of VR will be further exacerbated in the types of content that garner the most users. It will become entirely oriented around what they like to be, not what they like to watch.
This is a hard change of framing and mindset given that we are coming out of a television-obsessed, screen-obsessed, Hollywood-obsessed, watching-obsessed culture. Before I explained all of this the statement that VR could kill off the genre of violent action games probably would have sounded ridiculous. But given all I have explained, it seems rather obvious to me the violent action genre of video games will be increasingly threatened as VR proliferates and becomes ever more immersive. Simply because people don't like to literally be running around battle fields in high stress situations with explosions, blood, and people screaming. Such things have only been entertaining in video games because a screen enabled a significant disconnect from the experience. This isn't to say there will be no violent action games, of course there will be, just they will not reign unanimously in the charts as they do on screen-based platforms. In a highly immersive medium, something like a colorful cartoon gorilla playing tag can actually compete with a hyper-realistic soldier on a gory stressful battlefield.
Another interesting case study in this context is Phasmaphobia. A horror indie game which initially gained huge popularity as a VR title. It reached #2 most popular of all time in VR in its initial wave of popularity and still can have over 15k peak CCU in a day. But if you look at the most popular VR titles by CCU of users in an actual VR headset, Phasmaphobia isn't even in the first 20 pages anymore. Most people are playing with a controller on a screen now. What was initially a highly successful VR game that would still be in the top 10 VR list based on CCU now has so few users playing it in a VR headset that it is not even in the Top 200 VR list. It is a case of a game initially taking off as a VR-based title but then the userbase unanimously turning it into a screen-based title. Why?! I would suspect because the game is terrifying and unsettling in VR. Who wants to go into VR every night, be scared and put in high stress situations? People don't like to be the victim of a horror film, they like to watch it. Consequentially the regular players who appreciated the game have primarily migrated to playing it on a screen.
I personally had a similar experience to this with Half-Life Alyx which is an absolutely amazing VR game and is worth buying a Valve Index just to play. But the week I played through it was quite the investment of energy. I would not want to play Half-Life Alyx every night for months on end. That would be way too stressful. I think there will always be a market for these more stressful and more realistic VR experiences, but they won't be what maintains the most users in VR headsets.
I should note that the most popular chart on the Oculus Store is different, namely that Beat Saber is more popular than VRChat. But on the Oculus Store similar conclusions are reflected, as the three most popular titles are Beat Saber, Rec Room and VRChat, all of which tend towards a more cartoon-ish, stylized, less-stressful type of experience than that of a modern screen-based console shooter. I find some assume this tendency towards simpler and cartoonish in VR is because of hardware constraints, that it is a temporary fluke. Maybe this was the case 5 years ago, but there does now exist titles on both SteamVR and Quest with greater realism, but they don't tend to dominate the top trends. It's possible this is actually a signifier of a real pattern due to something about the nature of the experience in VR being different. My personal experience with VR would lead me to believe it is reflective of a real pattern. That the medium of a Hollywood film screen tended towards hyper-realism and violence, then screen-based console games followed that, but the medium of VR I think wants to be a different kind of style. Violence is not as enjoyable in a highly immersive medium. Then worlds and graphics which are more un-real become more interesting in VR. As I don't want to go into VR for an exact replication of physical reality, I want to go in VR for a reality that is as radically different from physical reality as it can get.
To anticipate where VR is headed you can't extrapolate it off of screen-based content. You need to put on the VR headset, forget everything you thought about digital entertainment before VR, and then experience VR with a fresh mind. Then second to that, observe people in the real world, observe what people want to be in the real world, as VR will reflect that more and more as it advances and creates greater immersion.