14 DAY TRIAL // Valve's Steam digital game distribution platform, revolutionary at its launch, proved a hit and has become the leader in the emerging market of legal game downloads.
The Steam client is installed on about 25 million computers and Valve regularly releases statistical data from its users. So far, it focused on the hardware capabilities of the machines, but with July's numbers, Steam made an interesting addition, a popular software list.
With such a large user base the results should be pretty relevant. However, Seam users aren't exactly representative of the computer users at large since they're likely more tech savvy than the average. This is evident from the software they use as well.
At the top spot, unsurprisingly, is Adobe Flash which is present on 96.79 percent of the computers in the study. This is pretty much on par with estimates and other numbers released so far.
Firefox comes in third place overall, if you don't count Steam which, goes without saying, was present on 100 percent of the PCs using Steam, with 63.05 percent of users having it installed. That's significantly more that Firefox's overall market share which is at about 25 percent worldwide.
While Steam users clearly don't like Internet Explorer too much, they're just warming up to Google Chrome, which is present on about 12 percent of the PCs. This is slightly higher that the average, but not by the margin seen by Firefox.
What's even more interesting though is that 8.69 percent of users also have Apple Safari installed and we're talking about Windows PCs here. Apparently, Apple's web browser is particularly popular with Steam users.
Another interesting entry in the list, as spotted by TorrentFreak, is uTorrent which is present on 29.41 percent of the PCs using Steam. The BitTorrent client is by far the most popular app of its kind on the list with the Mainline BitTorrent client coming in second, available on 5.28 percent of the machines. Vuze follows closely with 4.37 percent of Steam users having it installed.