# Steam: Virtual Reality's Biggest-Ever Jump In Users Happened Last Month

**URL:** <https://onehack.st/t/steam-virtual-realitys-biggest-ever-jump-in-users-happened-last-month/69479>\
**Category:** News & Articles\
**Tags:** technology, gaming\
**Created:** [February 13, 2020, 2:21pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/steam-virtual-realitys-biggest-ever-jump-in-users-happened-last-month/69479 "2020-02-13T14:21:04Z")\
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**Author:** ![Aina](https://onehack.st/user_avatar/onehack.st/aina/32/167469_2.png) [@Aina](https://onehack.st/u/Aina)\
**Post date:** [February 13, 2020, 2:21pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/steam-virtual-realitys-biggest-ever-jump-in-users-happened-last-month/69479/1 "2020-02-13T14:21:04Z")

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: _Valve’s gaming marketplace Steam includes an opt-in hardware survey feature, and the results are [published as percentages of surveyed users on a monthly basis](https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey). You’ll find all kinds of data about Steam-connected computers every month, and this includes operating systems, video cards, VR systems, and more. In the latter case, that figure is counted out of all Steam users – as opposed to a less-helpful stat like “70 percent of VR fans prefer Product A, 30 percent Product B.” We were intrigued (but not surprised) to see a jump in connected VR devices for the reported month of December 2019. That’s the holiday season, after all, and it’s reasonable to expect Santa’s deliveries of headsets to affect data._

 

_What surprised us was the continued growth of that metric through the following month – and a statistically significant one, at that. The latest survey, taken during January 2020, says that 1.31 percent of all surveyed Steam users own a VR system, up from 1.09 percent the month prior. By pure percentage points, this is the [largest one-month jump in pure percentage since Valve began tracking VR use in 2016](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/02/steam-virtual-realitys-biggest-ever-jump-in-users-happened-last-month/) – by a long shot. (For perspective, the same survey indicated that 0.9 percent of Steam computers run on Linux, while 3.0 percent use MacOS or OSX.)_ Based on Valve’s conservative January 2019 estimate of [90 million "monthly active users](https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/1697194621363928453)," Ars Technica estimates there are “1.17 million PC-VR users connecting to Steam.”

“Drawing an exponential trend line of Steam’s MAU between August 2017 and January 2019 would get us closer to a count of 1.6 million active VR hardware owners on Steam, and that doesn’t include any estimate of Steam-ignorant Oculus users. However you slice it, the juiciest detail can’t be argued: a 20.2% jump within a major PC-VR ecosystem in 30 days.”