Virtual Reality Adoption: Who buys a headset?
Quantic Foundry had collected over 2300 responses to a survey about virtual reality (VR) adoption - what kinds of players have bought a VR headset, who is still on the fence, and who isn’t interested at all. But the two-man company didn’t have time to analyze all that data alongside their main consulting work. My grad school colleague Jennifer Day and I offered to analyze the responses in coordination with (Quantic) founder Nick Yee.
What demographics and player motivations distinguish VR adopters from non-adopters?
What kinds of players are most satisfied with their VR purchase?
We took an exploratory approach to our analysis, dividing the workload based on broad analytic approaches - my focus was connecting VR adoption to Quantic Foundry’s flagship player motivation model. I split responses based on VR adoption and looked for differences in player motivations, focusing on effect sizes since traditional hypothesis testing is less informative with sample sizes in the thousands. We delivered our findings as a draft blog post, which Nick Yee finalized and published as a blog post.
Gaming motivation categories separated by VR adoption: “Yes” indicates purchase of a VR headset, “No” indicates no purchase.
Takeaways
Gamers who have purchased VR headsets tend to care about exciting, destructive gameplay - this may be driving purchase decisions
Gamers who were most satisfied with their VR purchase tended to care about immersion and exploration - but non-adopters don’t seem to be aware of this value
VR marketing should highlight the immersion and exploration of space, not just fast-paced action