Valve Reveals Top Selling VR Games on Steam in 2022

2023-01-05 16:36:22 By : Mr. baron zhu

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The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

The Daily Roundup is our comprehensive coverage of the VR industry wrapped up into one daily email, delivered directly to your inbox. 

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Another year of VR gaming has come and gone, and Valve has again released its annual sales figures for the past year, highlighting the best-selling VR titles on Steam.

Valve has published a series of ‘The Best of 2022‘ charts showing which titles on Steam have fared the best across several metrics. Among the charts is a list of the top 100 best-selling VR games on Steam in 2022, as measured by gross revenue.

You’ll find titles broken up from Bronze to Platinum level, however take note that Valve intentionally obscures which game ranks higher within each individual tier. Reload the page, and each title is shuffled, so there’s no telling which game did better within a given section.

Here we take a look at the top 23 games across the Gold and Platinum tiers. To give a little more context, we’ve sorted games by their positive user review scores. Oh, and don’t forget: many of these games are currently on sale during Steam’s Winter Sale, which ends on January 5th at 10AM PT.

As you can gather from the chart, 2022 wasn’t a big year for PC VR gaming in terms of fresh and popular releases, with only two titles released in 2022 hitting the highest rung of Steam sales: Zenith: The Last City and BONELAB.

In the platinum tier, 25% of titles were released in 2017, 17% in 2018, 17% in 2019, 17% in 2020, and 8% in 2021. Of those titles, 25% were marked Early Access.

Here you’ll notice a lot more early access titles, offering up 55% of this year’s gold-tier sales.  None of these were released in 2022 however, which is a bit of a downer for newcomers.

On the flipside, many of these titles have benefitted from steadfast developer support, with titles like Hot Dogs, Horseshoes & Hand Grenades, Hellsplit: Arena, Contractors, Hard Bullet, and Legendary Tales seeing updates over the course of the year.

In the gold tier, 18% of titles were released in 2016, 9% in 2017, 18% in 2018, 18% in 2019, 18% in 2020, and 18% in 2021—a strangely even spread.

Check out the full list of Steam’s top selling VR titles in 2022 to see which games made it into the Silver and Bronze tiers.

Looking for this year’s top VR games across platforms? Check out Road to VR’s 2022 Game of the Year & Design Award winners. You’re sure to see some familiar faces.

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Glad to see VR Kanjo is still up there. It deserves it especially with the nudity mod. Even if you try it once it’s well worth it.

It’s because of this, I rarely fire up my vr. nothing new, nothing revolutionary, nothing ground-breaking. The vr game market is lame and needs revitalizing. Same old same old…

Hubris, Green Hell VR, Kayak VR Mirage, Half-Life 2 VR Mod, Moss Book 2, Wanderer, Alyx Levitation, Red Matter 2, Ultrawings 2, Vox Machinae singleplayer etc.

Many awesome VR launched in 2022. Even two AAA games, Hitman 3 VR and F1 22.

I mean, let’s be honest, Hitman 3 VR was absolute garbage and an utter embarrassment to the VR scene. The rest of your point stands though (IMO)

As Summer Redstone of Viacom famously said about television programming, “Content is king.”

VR urgently needs highly compelling, quality content that leverages the unique strengths of the medium.

New hardware is great, but playing same old titles in higher resolution won’t change anything fundamental, which is lack of content?

what are you even talking about, do you even own vr? half life alyx on pcvr alone is enough to carry the industry for the next 15 years.

MSFS 2020 on a RTX 4090 is the only way to do VR.

Just needs a Pimax 12K…

glad to see PCVR is FaR from dead

VTOL VR? W… T…. F….. I’m calling Shenanigans!

One game that, SOMEHOW, always slips below the radar of most VR Players is The Forest. It’s a top-notch VR game and even better in Co-Op. My friend and myself played it for around 200+ hours.

It’s also disheartening that Moss never seems to make the list.

And Beat Saber. GACK, BEAT SABER! Stupid box punching, glowstick game. Music games are always so LAME… except Thumper! That game was MIND BLOWING! Another, often over looked game.

The forest VR is amazing, sure thing, but so is beat saber, I downloaded sh*tload of custom levels though

I am really curious why you say Thumper was “MIND BLOWING”. Especially when claiming Beat Saber and others were lame.

I really tried to like Thumper. But in my opinion, Thumper is the one that was the lame rhythm game. Very limited controls, just bump left, bump right, jump, and maybe a couple others. It was very repetitive with apparently the same boss guy at the end of each level. Music wasn’t engaging. I was completely bored by about level 4 trying to understand why this limited, boring, repetitive game was so highly reviewed, and refunded it.

The only thing propping up PCVR right now is flat to VR conversions. Let’s hope the forthcoming PSVR2 can boost VR creativity and AAA releases, though looking at all the shovelware and crappy quest 2 conversions on the release list I’m not overly optimistic.

right now? always has been. but it’s the kind of VR that interests noone and doesn’t bring any industry any further.

modded VR is dead VR.

hopefully with PSVR2, there will be more VR games targeting PC-level hardware.

no, not PC-level hardware that various from person to person, but one unified hardware that every developer can target.