Valve has updated its March Steam hardware survey with more accurate numbers on VR headsets than in past months. According to this update, 1.29 percent of Steam users own some kind of VR headset.

This equates to over 1 million VR headsets, which is a conservative estimate, but Valved announced in April 2019 that Steam has 90 million active users (1 billion accounts). Depending on the number of current active Steam accounts, the number of Steam users with VR headsets could be several hundred thousand more. It is important to note that we do not know how many users actually responded to the hardware survey or how representative they are of the entire Steam user base.

In any case, the latest data is the most accurate count of VR hardware on Steam to date. This is because Valve has changed the way it collects this type of data: according to UploadVR, they received an email from Valve explaining that starting March 1, Steam will no longer just scan current USB devices, but will now use records of any headset connected in the past month. They received this from Valve.

Steam's aggregation method still uses the latter as a fallback, but no longer aggregates only VR headsets currently connected to a PC. For some reason, especially if there is a lack of USB ports, a VR headset may be unplugged after a gaming session. In such cases, the unplugged headset will still be counted.

When it comes to which VR headsets are most popular, it is almost even between the Oculus Rift S (27.05%) and the HTC Vive (26.67%). The Oculus Quest, which we consider the best VR headset for many, accounts for 2.89 percent of the tally. This probably means that Steam cannot be counted because the majority of users are untethered to their headsets. It will be interesting to see if this number grows, both as more supply is replenished and as more people invest in Link cables to connect their headsets to their PCs.

Pimax also participated in the hardware survey. Its high-resolution 5K Plus and 8K headsets together account for 0.33 percent of all VR headsets. That's the equivalent of 30,000 very expensive headsets, but a small percentage.