New data shows Windows 10 adoption trends on Steam

Mar 2, 2016 07:04 GMT  ·  By

Windows 10 keeps growing on Steam at a pretty impressive pace, so it’s now very close to overtaking Windows 7 and becoming the most popular operating system on Valve’s gaming platform.

Data provided for the month of February 2016 shows that Windows 7 64-bit continues to be the leading choice for Steam gamers with 34.21 percent, but the 64-bit version of Windows 10 comes extremely close at 34.01 percent.

Furthermore, Windows 10 is well positioned to overtake Windows 7 this month, so expect a switch of places when the next batch of statistics is provided. Windows 10 64-bit improved its Steam share by 1.24 percent last month while Windows 7 64-bit lost 0.10 percent.

Users are moving away from Windows 8 very fast, with the 64-bit version now at 1.71 percent, and the 32-bit at 0.15 percent. Windows XP holds steady for the moment and even improved its share a bit, growing by 0.08 percent in February to reach 2.39 percent.

Windows goes up, OS X and Linux go down

Thanks to the growth posted by Windows 10 last month, the overall Steam share of Windows is also improving, now reaching 95.59 percent, up 0.20 percent in February. At the same time, both OS X and Linux declined by 0.15 percent and 0.04 percent, respectively.

Clearly, Windows continues to remain the number one gaming platform at the moment, and that’s unlikely to change in the short term, especially thanks to the growth experienced by Windows 10 these days.

In the long term, however, Microsoft’s supremacy could be challenged by new technologies currently in development, such as Vulkan, which could make alternative platforms better choices for gaming.

Certainly, it could take a while until it happens, but Microsoft needs to start thinking ahead and decide how to improve in gaming after Windows 10.