In recent months, Windows 11 has been enjoying steady growth on Valve’s Steam gaming platform. However, the monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey shows that the OS took a significant drop during the month of March.
In fact, Valve’s user survey shows that Windows 11 usage declines from 30% in February to 2214% in March.
It is worth reiterating that this is a voluntary survey, so it is not representative of 100% of Steam users. Even so, it is a solid metric for seeing which platforms are popular on the service. Even so, it shows that Windows 11’s recent growth was not representative of a wider shift to the latest OS.
That’s because Steam users still seem to be turning to Windows 10 more often than not. In fact, Win10 usage grew by over 10 percentage points to 73.59%. It seems that Windows 10 growth directly impacted Windows 11.
Microsoft is unlikely to be too worried considering its Windows platform still utterly dominates Steam usage. Valve’s monthly report shows that Windows 11 and Windows 10 hold a total of 96.36% of users. Interestingly, some users are still accessing the gaming platform from legacy versions of Windows.
March Steam Usage By Operating System
For example, Windows 8 and Windows 7 still register on the survey despite Microsoft no longer supporting these platforms. Interestingly, both those older operating systems still have more users than non-Windows platforms such as macOS.
Although, Windows 7 and Windows 8 users will need to move on soon. Valve has announced it will stop providing support for steam on legacy Windows versions. “The newest features in Steam rely on an embedded version of Google Chrome, which no longer functions on older versions of Windows,” the company announced last week.
- Windows 10 64-bit – 73.95% (+10.49)
- Windows 11 – 22.41% (-7.92)
- Windows 7 64-bit – 1.06% (-0.54)
- Windows 8.1 64-bit – 0.20% (-0.19)
- Windows 7 32-bit – 0.05% (-0.06)
Steam is one of the most popular PC Gaming platforms and has more than 120 million active users as of January 2021.
Tip of the day: Whether it’s for a presentation, song, or YouTube video, at some point in your life you’ll need to record audio from your computer. Windows 11 has multiple options to record sound due to its litany of apps. In our tutorial, we show you how to record audio using the built-in Windows 10 Voice Recorder and the freeware audio editor Audacity.
