Oculus Rift is now the most popular VR headset on Steam

When the HTC Vive launched in 2016, one of its major advantages over the competition was supposed to be its integration with the Steam platform through Valve's SteamVR standard. Last month, though, Valve's regular Steam user hardware survey found that Oculus Rift users now outnumber HTC Vive users on Steam for the first time.

The Rift now represents about 47 percent of all VR headset users on Steam, according to the survey, sneaking just past the Vive at about 45 percent. Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality initiative, launched late last year, accounts for just over 5 percent of the VR users on the platform.

Oculus Rift usage on Steam started shooting up last summer, right around the time Oculus slashed the price of its Rift-and-Touch-controller package to $399 in July (the HTC Vive would later drop from $799 to $599 in August). Reported Rift use on Steam climbed from 35.7 percent of VR users in July to 46.9 percent in September after the price drop. That jump also followed a July update to Oculus Home that let Rift users launch SteamVR apps directly via Oculus' platform rather than going through the SteamVR interface.

The Valve hardware survey is a self-selected voluntary sample of all Steam users and only detects VR headsets that are actively plugged in to the computer when the survey tool is run. Still, the rough parity between the two headsets is noteworthy given the Vive's use of the SteamVR standard, which Valve continues to update.

The Valve hardware survey is a self-selected voluntary sample of all Steam users and only detects VR headsets that are actively plugged in to the computer when the survey tool is run. Still, the rough parity between the two headsets is noteworthy given the Vive's use of the SteamVR standard, which Valve continues to update.

Overall, VR users still represent an incredibly tiny minority of all the PC gamers on Steam—just under 0.3 percent when Rift and Vive users are combined. That translates to just about 200,000 users with VR access among the 67 million monthly active users Steam reported as of August. PlayStation VR, by contrast, managed to sell two million units in just over a year, though it's hard to say how many of those units are still in active use.