Valve's Index VR headset is now over four years old. Despite their age, the headphones have continued to sell at a staggering rate over the years—but, as they say, nothing lasts.
Valve's goal with Index is to set the standard for PC VR headsets. By many measures, it achieves this goal. Despite its $1,000 price tag and the age of the headset, the Index remains the second most used headset on Steam as of June 2023, accounting for 18.38% of active headsets on the platform (albeit behind Quest 2 at 42.05%). Even with just one headset, this makes Valve the second-largest headset provider on the platform.
While PC VR headsets have been released, with higher resolution or OLED displays, and even cheaper prices, the headset's balance of comfort, visuals, sound, tracking, and controllers make it a popular choice as its spec sheet suggests.
While Index usage remains strong, headphone sales appear to be declining after years of holding steady.
While Valve doesn't share the revenue of individual products on its platform, Steam does rank the best-selling titles by revenue on a weekly basis. Thanks to SteamDB's data archive, we've been able to get a rough idea of how the headset's sales performance has trended over the years.
Data is sometimes sparse; for most datasets, we only know the top 10 products by weekly revenue (if the index falls below the top 10, we don't know exactly how much it has dropped), but Steam recently started sharing the top 100, giving us a clearer picture of the downward trend in index sales.
The exact reason for the sudden change in trend is unknown, but we have a hypothesis. The recession comes roughly six to eight months after Valve released the Steam Deck, the company's first hardware product since Index. The turning point also occurs around the new year from 2022 to 2023.
Especially given that actual usage of the headset remains strong, our best guess is that Index sales are trending down, mostly because Valve has shifted its focus to Steam Deck; possibly even more so after the company sees how well the device sells in the 2022 holiday season.
Although Valve used to promote Index in different places on the Steam storefront, now Steam Deck seems to appear more frequently in front of Steam's huge users:
Valve may even reallocate some of Exponent's manufacturing capacity to meet the demand for the Steam Deck.
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It's hard to say what this means for Index and Valve's future VR hardware ambitions. There's no doubt that the introduction of standalone headsets has changed the VR landscape significantly since Index first launched. There are signs that Valve is still working behind the scenes, but the company's limited attention is likely to be mostly on Steam Deck for the foreseeable future.