{"id":303425,"date":"2025-10-14T19:36:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T19:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/303425\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T19:36:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T19:36:11","slug":"quest-3-passes-a-critical-milestone-as-the-most-used-vr-headset-on-steam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/303425\/","title":{"rendered":"Quest 3 Passes a Critical Milestone as the Most-used VR Headset on Steam"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly two years after its launch, Quest 3 has finally claimed the top spot as the most-used VR headset on Steam. Though the metric is measured by Steam\u2019s stats, the importance of the milestone has little to do with PC VR.<\/p>\n

The News<\/p>\n

Quest 2\u2019s four-and-a-half year streak as the most-used VR headset on Steam has finally come to an end, dethroned by Meta\u2019s own Quest 3. Fittingly, Quest 3\u2019s ascendance comes almost exactly two years after the headset was first released on October 10th, 2023.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s according to the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey<\/a>, which reports\u00a0some baseline statistics about what kind of hardware and software is used by the platform\u2019s population, and to see how things are changing over time, including the use of VR headsets.<\/p>\n

The latest data shows that Quest 2 has fallen to 26.17%, while Quest 3 just barely ahead for the first time with 26.68% of the share of monthly-connected VR headsets on the platform.<\/p>\n

The next closest headset is Valve\u2019s own Index, coming in at a distant third with 13.47% share.<\/p>\n

While it took Quest 3 two years to steal the throne, Quest 2 had a more meteoric rise. It took just a few\u00a0months\u00a0after release for Quest 2 to overtake the then-reigning champion, Rift S. And it held onto the #1 spot for a staggering four-and-a-half years\u2026 until now.<\/p>\n

Released back in October 2020, Quest wasn\u2019t just a more affordable and refined version of Meta\u2019s promising new line of standalone \u2018Quest\u2019 headsets. It was also launched right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that ensued; a time when people were looking for ways to connect and escape without leaving their homes.<\/p>\n

While Quest 2 was launched as the company\u2019s most affordable standalone headset to date, Quest 3 launched with a higher price and without the boost of a global pandemic. It may have taken two years for it to take the crown as the most-used VR headset on Steam, but that doesn\u2019t make the moment any less important.<\/p>\n

My Take
\n\"\"<\/a>Image courtesy Meta<\/p>\n

Quest 3\u2019s rise to the most-used headset on Steam actually has little to do with PC VR. More importantly, I see it as the most concrete sign we have that the transition between Quest 2 and Quest 3 is finally tipping toward the latter.<\/p>\n

This has important implications for developers and Meta\u2019s VR ecosystem.<\/p>\n

At launch, Quest 3 was heavily marketed around its \u201cmixed reality\u201d (AKA passthrough AR) capabilities. Indeed it had significantly higher resolution passthrough cameras with color\u2014a huge improvement over the grainy, black & white passthrough capabilities of Quest 2.<\/p>\n

But with such a huge population of Quest 2 headsets, developers had little incentive to build mixed reality content that only worked well on Quest 3. And so most developers stayed focused on building pure VR content that would run just as well on either headset.<\/p>\n

Even among the pure VR content, many developers weren\u2019t initially focused on tapping Quest 3\u2019s extra power and resolution; understandably, it was difficult to commit the resources to optimizing for a headset that was just getting a foothold among the Quest population.<\/p>\n

That led to a string of major releases that launched either without consideration for Quest 3 at all, or at best, an eventual post-launch patch with improvements for Quest 3. Even Meta\u2019s own major first-party release, Asgard\u2019s Wrath 2 (2023), wasn\u2019t well optimized for Quest 3 at launch; it took five months before the game was finally updated to tap the headset\u2019s greater power and visual quality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today, I think we can say the tide has finally shifted. Quest 3 is not only the most used headset on Steam; its sibling, Quest 3S, has nearly the same capabilities, and itself holds a 7.87% share of VR headsets used on Steam. Combined, the two headsets make up 34.55% of the headsets used on Steam.<\/p>\n

The shift between generations is undeniably here.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that Quest 2 is out for the count. It\u2019s still the second-most used headset on Steam and surely makes up a huge portion of active Quest users overall. But whereas Quest 2 had clearly been the primary focus for most developers, the time has come for Quest 3 and 3S become the greater priority.<\/p>\n

The shift was a long time coming, especially for Meta. The company had been banking on mixed reality as a killer feature for its new headsets; even if it was (and I\u2019d argue the company still hasn\u2019t proven that out), Meta\u2019s own success with the proliferation and longevity of Quest 2 prevented mixed reality from taking center stage. As I wrote back in 2023<\/a>, a late surge in Quest 2 sales, a higher price point for Quest 3, and a lack of a \u2018killer app\u2019 for mixed reality slowed the transition to the next generation seemingly more than Meta would have liked. Hence it taking a whole two years for Quest 3 to finally eclipse Quest 2 as Steam\u2019s #1 headset.<\/p>\n

Now as Quest 3 and 3S are ready to take the spotlight among developers, users may start to see more of the mixed reality vision that Meta had promised at the launch of Quest 3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly two years after its launch, Quest 3 has finally claimed the top spot as the most-used VR…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":303426,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[158,67,132,68,729,730],"class_list":{"0":"post-303425","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-technology","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-virtual-reality","13":"tag-vr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115374207465992333","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303425\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}