Can Alyx pull VR out of its niche?

Given how many people have been waiting for so very long for a new Half-Life game, it's entirely unsurprising that the upcoming Half-Life: Alyx is making some pretty big ripples in the pond even before its launch.
One of the more notable of these is its impact on the Valve Index, the company's high-end VR headset, which had struggled to make its mark prior to the Alyx announcement. Now, it's sold out almost everywhere, with keen consumers rapidly burning through stock of the device towards the end of last year. Superdata reported that Valve sold 103,000 Index headsets in the final quarter of the year, but given the inventory issues, it's hard to say what kind of numbers the device might have done if all of the consumer demand could have been satisfied.
These numbers are pretty impressive when you consider that the Index is a luxury, high-end headset that's priced to match -- it's often cited as a thousand-dollar headset, but in many territories consumers would have to spend significantly more than that to buy the full headset, controller and sensor kit required to get the complete experience.

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