The Steam Frame survey numbers for October 2026 are in, and they are a lot bigger than I expected. In Valve’s latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey, the Valve Steam Frame now accounts for 4.13% of VR headsets used on Steam. In September it was 0.41%, so its share has grown roughly ten-fold in a single month.
This was spotted by u/slowlyun over on r/SteamFrame, in a thread called “Good news: Frame above Rift S & PSVR2 in October survey“. I went through the survey page myself to check every figure in this article against Valve’s own table, so here is what the October results actually say, and what is still just community guesswork.
What the October Steam Hardware Survey shows
Valve’s VR Headsets table lists the share of each headset among Steam users who have one connected. Here is the top of that table for October 2026, with the change from September in brackets:
- Meta Quest 3: 27.27% (+0.36)
- Oculus Quest 2: 22.23% (-3.57)
- Meta Quest 3S: 11.04% (-0.04)
- Valve Index HMD: 9.90% (-0.93)
- Pico 4: 4.50% (-0.26)
- Valve Steam Frame: 4.13% (+3.72)
- Oculus Rift S: 3.26% (-0.14)
- Sony PS VR2: 2.41% (+0.10)
- HTC Vive: 2.00% (-0.26)
That puts the Steam Frame in sixth place overall. It has jumped above the Oculus Rift S and Sony’s PS VR2, and it is now only just behind the Pico 4. It is still a long way behind Meta’s headsets, which hold the top three spots between them.
Steam Frame survey share: September vs October
Valve’s chart for the Steam Frame shows tiny values in earlier months (0.01% to 0.02%), then 0.41% in September and 4.13% in October. Going from 0.41% to 4.13% is an increase of 3.72 percentage points, or just over ten times the September share. That is the biggest monthly gain of any headset in the table by a wide margin.
Valve Index drops below 10% and VR use grows overall
The other headline from the table is the Valve Index. It fell 0.93 points to 9.90%. In the months shown on Valve’s chart, which go back to May 2025, the Index had never been below 10.83% before, so this is the lowest figure on that chart. u/slowlyun suggests it may be the first time ever that the Index has been in single figures. I can’t confirm that from the survey page itself, as it only shows the recent months.
Overall VR use went up as well. Valve says 1.75% of Steam users who took the survey had a VR headset in October, up 0.40 points from September. I think that makes the Steam Frame’s jump look even better, because its share grew within a VR group that also got bigger.
Why some people see “Deckard” in the survey
A second r/SteamFrame thread, “Valve Hardware Survey shows frame as Deckard“, came from u/Creeper2145. They shared a screenshot of the survey window on their own PC before submitting it. In that window the headset is listed as “Valve Deckard MP (vrlink)”, and the two controllers show up as “Valve Roy_Left” and “Valve Roy_Right”.
To be clear, this is only what the survey collects on a user’s own machine. On the public results page, the headset is listed as “Valve Steam Frame”, not Deckard. Deckard is the codename the headset was known by for a long time before launch. In the thread, u/asdfu09 pointed out the Blade Runner link, with Deckard for the headset and Roy for the controllers. u/MonorailPurple added that it has always shown as Deckard in account purchase and device API data too.
Does 4.13% mean 100,000 Steam Frames?
This is where I want to be careful. Valve does not publish unit numbers in the survey, only percentages. u/slowlyun wrote that 4.13% “could be as much as 100,000 units”, and noted that 0.41% had been estimated at around 10,000. In the same thread, u/JorgTheElder worked it out at about 108,000, assuming around 150 million Steam users.
Those are Redditors’ estimates, not Valve figures. They depend on how many people use Steam in total and on the survey sample matching the wider user base. Not everyone in the thread was convinced either. u/Shin_Ken thinks timing matters, as many owners won’t have been asked to submit the survey yet, so the numbers may lag behind. u/xaduha called the survey “flakey” and said big swings between headsets have happened before and been corrected the following month. So I’d treat any unit number as a rough guess for now.
My thoughts
Even with those caveats, this is a good sign for Valve’s headset. A share above the Rift S and PS VR2 after such a short time is better than many people in the community expected, including u/slowlyun, who said the result proved their own lower estimate wrong. If you already have one, my SFrameOverlay performance overlay guide and my look at Cyberpunk 2077 performance on the Steam Frame are worth a read. For where it all started, my thoughts on the leaked Steam Machine and Steam Frame info is still up.
I’ll keep an eye on the November survey to see whether the Steam Frame keeps climbing or levels off. Let me know in the comments if you’ve picked one up.
