More than half of Steam gamers now use Windows 10

By Jon Martindale Published April 3, 2017

Closing in on two years since the release of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 10, a majority of Steam gamers have now moved over to it, leaving previous standout Windows 7 in their wake. While it still has a strong showing, Windows 8.1 is seeing far less usage, and Windows Vista has all but disappeared.

Microsoft made a big play for gamer hearts with Windows 10, making the upgrade from 7 and 8.1 free for a year and offering exclusive features like DirectX 12 support. It has still taken some time for it to be adopted by gamers though and ongoing concerns like AMD Ryzen support don’t help the matter. However, gradually, gamers are moving over to the contemporary OS.

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At the time of writing, the Steam Survey results tell us that with the standard and 64-bit versions of Windows 10 combined, 51.2 percent of all Steam users are running them. That gives it quite a lead over previous standout Windows 7 64-bit, which currently has 29.97 percent of the audience. Standard Windows 7 editions control just 4.77 percent now, a drop of nearly half a percent in the last month alone.

Windows 8.1 64-bit is still holding on with a 7.72 percent share of the market — and it actually saw a 0.03 percent rise in March. Its 32-bit version is almost nonexistent at this point, though, with just 0.22 percent of Steam gamers running it (thanks MSPowerUser).

Apart from that and standard editions of Windows 8, Microsoft’s latest operating system is eating into all of the other shares. It rose 2.44 percent in the last month, showing impressive growth in such a short period. It cannibalized 1.44 percent from Windows 7 64bit during that time, but will have to go further to make it as redundant as the intermediary Windows 8.1.

Elsewhere in the spectrum, OSX saw a minor decline in March, but did see 0.4 percent of Steam gamers move over to the 10.12.3 64bit release, while Linux gamers appear to be moving to Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS 64bit. The combination of that and a couple of other distros saw an overall increase of 0.02 percent in March, giving Linux a 0.77 percent share of the total gaming market.

For those of you still running Windows 7, why haven’t you made the switch to Windows 10 yet?

Former Evergreen writer

Jon Martindale covers how to guides, best-of lists, and explainers to help everyone understand the hottest new hardware and…

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