Windows 10 records major drop in Steam monthly stats

Oct 3, 2017 09:06 GMT  ·  By

Moving users from Windows 7 is Microsoft’s top priority right now, especially because this operating system is reaching end of support in January 2020, but this month’s market share stats show that things aren’t going very well for the software giant in this regard.

Windows 7 has regained valuable market share points and what’s worse for Microsoft is that Windows 10 also dropped substantially, especially at a time when more users were actually expected to upgrade.

Valve’s latest figures for the month of September indicate that while Windows 10 is still the top choice for Steam gamers with 45.37 percent, it recorded a drop of no less than 4.66 percent, which is a dramatic number given Microsoft’s push for increased adoption of the OS.

Non-Windows platforms for gaming

At the same time, Windows 7 managed to recover in a pretty surprising way, reaching 41.01 percent, up no less than 6 percent over the previous month’s figures. If the same trend is maintained for both Windows 7 and Windows 10, the latter is very likely to be dethroned the next month, making Windows 7 the leader once again.

The third choice right now is Windows 8.1 61-bit, which runs on 5.23 percent of Steam systems (down 0.78 percent), followed by the 32-bit version of Windows 7, which remains a popular version of 2.98 percent of the users.

When it comes to non-Windows operating systems being used to play games on Steam, Apple’s macOS is the second option after Windows with 2.74 percent share, down 0.29 percent from the previous month. Again, macOS 10.12.6 is the leading choice with 1.40 percent, an increase of 0.36 percent versus August.

Linux, on the other hand, remains just the third option with only 0.60 percent of the systems currently running it, down 0.03 percent. Ubuntu 16.04.3 is now number one in the Linux world for gaming with 0.14 percent.