April was a big month for VR, with Steam's hardware survey showing an increase of nearly 950,000 VR headsets over the previous month. This record-breaking surge comes as Half-Life: Alyx, perhaps the most high-profile shooter ever released on the VR platform, is set to be the most popular VR title in the next few months. According to industry trend watcher Road to VR, this means that 1.91% of Steam users, or about 2.7 million people, used VR headsets on Steam in April. This number reflects Steam's "monthly connected headsets" count, or the number of VR headsets that Steam recognizes as connected to a Steam account while online. It does not necessarily reflect actual usage.

Road to VR performed the calculations necessary to convert these numbers from percentages and compared them to previous hardware surveys and Steam subscriber numbers. They also compared these numbers to the adoption of other niche hardware and software on Steam. For example, Linux was found on only 0.89% of the machines surveyed, while 7.2% of the hardware had CPUs with 8 or more cores. [The Steam Hardware Survey is often an indicator of trends in the gaming industry, as it is the largest single survey of PC gamers' hardware. Trends like the rise of AMD processors last year were evident in the Hardware Survey results. This surge in VR penetration was fairly predictable, albeit unexpectedly high, following last month's surge.

If this news has you considering VR, consider checking out our guide to the best VR headsets.

Thanks, Road to VR.