Valve has released its monthly report on Steam market shares broken down by each operating system in the market and there is some surprising news for Windows 10 and 11.
According to the latest Steam Hardware and Software Search results, Windows 11 experienced a 0.11% decline in its market share on Steam, going from 21.23% to 21.12%. This effectively marks the first time Windows 11 has lost players on Steam instead of gaining them.
And judging by the same dataset, Windows 10 increased its market share on Steam by 1.91% in the same month. This would imply that the operating system managed to catch those who abandoned Windows 11, because they certainly didn’t go to Windows 8.1 or Windows 7, both of which lost market share last month with Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit). ) losing a whole percentage point (1.03%, to be exact), with the 64-bit version of the old OS accounting for 0.97% on its own.
Analysis: what does it all mean?
If gamers on Steam were willing to go back to Windows 10 despite it being an older operating system, there’s a good chance they were unhappy with the Windows 11 experience. continue to break various features, we can sympathize.
There’s also the fact that, looking at the overall market share on Steam, Microsoft had trouble convincing players to switch to Windows 11. Monthly increases in market share have been marginal at best, and only 21.12% of gamers are using it overall versus 73.17% using Windows 10.
Considering that in a period of one month we had breaks in Microsoft Outlookan update that caused a endless restart loopand in progress problems with printing that have yet to be fully patched, it’s no surprise that gamers prefer to stick with the much more stable operating system. And as far as we can tell from the July 2022 survey results, there seem to be some who have given Windows 11 a try and decided to roll back to Windows 10.
Equally interesting, perhaps, is the large number of Windows 7 users who have decided to upgrade, but who seem to have upgraded to Windows 10 rather than Windows 11. for their new operating system.
Over time, this change will happen, particularly as Windows 11 becomes more stable as it matures. Lest we forget, the suddenly beloved Windows 10 was also a buggy, unstable when it first launched, so there’s no reason to think Windows 11 won’t follow the same trajectory in the future.