Valve publishes Steam figures for March 2018
The 64-bit version of Windows 7 lost no less than 11.45% Steam share last month to 57.05%, while Windows 10 64-bit increased 10.28% to 35.69%. If the same trend is maintained, Windows 10 could rebecome the top operating system on Steam in just a couple of months.
But by the looks of things, this trend isn’t necessarily caused by more users installing Windows 10, as it appears to be more or less connected to Windows OS usage in China. In late 2017, Windows 7 experienced a dramatic boom that was believed to be caused by the release of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
Coupled with a significant increase for the Chinese language on Steam, experts believed this was the result of more users running pirated versions of the game, hence Windows 7 adoption also increasing – despite Windows 10 itself already cracked as well.
The same theory appears to make sense these days when Windows 7 is declining, as Chinese also dropped 11.69% to 52.24% last month. English, which is the prevalent language that gamers use, is the runner-up with 23.14% and an increase of 5.52%.
Last month, Windows declined 0.37% overall on Steam, but Microsoft’s desktop system still powers 97.94% of the computers running Valve’s gaming platform. Apple’s OSX increased 0.31% to 1.64%, while Linux posted a growth of 0.05% to 0.33%.
Windows 10 is expected to continue its recovery in April, especially because Microsoft is gearing up for the release of Spring Creators Update during the month. The new OS version brings several improvements for gamers as well, though it’ll be interesting to see if Windows 7 remains a tough nut to track given the Chinese trend.
