DDM Games Investment Review – Aug 03, 2016

A Look at VR Supported Games on Steam

With the release of the Oculus Rift on March 28th for $599 and the HTC Vive on April 5th for $799, we looked at games that support VR on Steam, pulling games and information from both Steam and SteamSpy on July 19th. Eliminating games that have yet to be released and less gaming-oriented apps, such as utilities and movie-watching, we found 220 games with VR support had been released on or since March 28th:

  • In descending order, the most common price points for these games released on or since March 28th were: free/free-to-play (17%), $19.99 (14%), $9.99 (12%), $4.99 (11%) and $14.99 (11%).
  • Of the premium games, prices ranged from $0.99 to $39.99 with the median price point being $9.99.
  • 31% of these games are in Early Access with all offering support for the Vive and a quarter offering Rift support.
  • After eliminating games with fewer than five reviews, nearly two-thirds of the games achieved a 75% or higher percentage of positive reviews from Steam users.
  • Nearly 5% offered Rift-only support while 63% of the games offered Vive-only support and 32% offered support for both the Rift and HTC Vive.
  • For play space, over a third of the games offered both standing room scales, 20% offered all three scales (seated, standing and room), 17% offered a seated-only scale, 16% offered a room-only scale, 10% offered seated and standing and 2% were standing-only.
  • For games that listed a room scale (23%), room scales ranged from 2m x 1.5m to 4m x 3m with the two most common room scales listed as 2m x 15m and 2m x 2m.
  • Among Vive-only games, only one game offered gamepad and keyboard/mouse inputs while among games that supported both Rift and Vive headsets, 58% of these games included tracked motion control inputs in addition to gamepad and/or keyboard/mouse.
  • SteamSpy provides an estimated number of a game’s owners by scraping Steam user profiles:
    • In descending order, the top five by ownership overall: The Lab, Surgeon Simulator VR: Meet the Medic, Heaven Island Life, Fantastic Contraption and Realities with the number of owners in these titles ranging from 220,000 to 91,000 users.
    • In descending order, the top five priced at $19.99 by ownership: Audioshield, The Solus Project, Vanishing Realms, Modbox and Pool Nation VR with the number of owners in these titles ranging from 65,000 to 24,000.
    • In descending order, the top five priced at $9.99 by ownership: theBlu, Jeeboman, Apollo 11 VR, HoloBall and The Nest with the number of owners in these titles ranging from 35,000 to 5,000 users.

The most common genres after “Indie” in descending order: action, casual, simulation, adventure and sports while the most common user tags (after eliminating first-person): horror, multiplayer, atmospheric, puzzle and sci-fi.