During Melbourne Games Week this week, Valve revealed a fresh set of official figures about it’s user population on Steam. Mashing up the figures with Valve’s monthly Steam Survey data gives us fresh insight into the number of VR headsets currently in use on on the platform.
A tweet from Melbourne Games Week, spotted by Gamasutra, shows Valve’s Sean Jenkin and Kristian Miller at a podium giving a presentation during the event, with a slide showing fresh Steam user stats which represent impressive growth for the company:
- 47M daily active users
- 90M monthly active users
- 18.5M peak concurrent users
- 1.6M new purchasers per month
It’s the 90 million monthly active users which is most relevant for our purposes, because it gives us an accurate way to derive absolute values from Valve’s percentage-based monthly Hardware & Software Survey, which handily also includes information about VR headsets in use on the platform.
Road to VR ran the figure against the most recent Hardware & Software Survey (September), and found the following counts for headsets connected to users’ computers over the course of the month.
| Oculus Rift | 306,000 |
| HTC Vive | 274,000 |
| Windows Mixed Reality | 47,000 |
| HTC Vive Pro | 13,000 |
| Oculus Rift DK2 | 7,000 |
| Total | 647,000 |
It’s worth noting that the Steam Hardware & Software Survey counts how many users have headsets attached to their computers; even if the user didn’t actually use the headset to play a game in the given month, it would still be counted. So it would be more accurate to call the figures above ‘Monthly Attached VR Headsets on Steam’ rather than ‘Monthly Active VR Users on Steam’, though this is the closest indicator we’ve got to the latter. Actual unit sales are likely significantly higher than the ‘headsets attached’ figures that we have here, but none of the above manufacturers have released official figures at this point.
While just 0.72% of Steam’s 90 million monthly active users had VR headsets attached to their computers in September, the figure has been growing at a steady clip. Valve said back in July that monthly active VR users on Steam had increased by 160% compared to a year prior.