Stats show small decline in Steam market share for Win10

Oct 3, 2016 05:55 GMT  ·  By

Windows 10 is no longer available as a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8.1 and this obviously led to a slowdown in adoption rate across the world, but September brought something a little bit more unexpected.

Third-party data provided by Net Applications indicated that Windows 10 actually declined during the month of September, and now figures collected by Valve for its Steam gaming platform are showing the same thing.

Specifically, the 64-bit version of Windows 10 improved its share by 0.04 percent, reaching 47.48 percent, but on the other hand, the 32-bit flavor of the same operating system lost 0.09 percent to 1.42 percent. This means that, overall, Windows 10 lost 0.05 percent on Steam, which is just a small decline, but obviously not the best news for Microsoft given the push for more users to install it.

Windows 10, however, is currently at 48.9 percent on Steam, which means that almost 1 in 2 computers used on Valve’s gaming platform are running Microsoft’s new operating system.

Windows 8.1, the big winner of Windows 10’s decline

Even though Windows 10 has lost some users last month, it’s not Windows 7 the one that improved, but Windows 8.1. The 64-bit version of Windows 8.1 posted a growth of 0.09 percent to 8.66 percent, while the 32-bit SKU gained 0.01 percent to 0.28 percent.

Windows 7 continues to be the second most-used desktop operating system on Steam with 28.68 percent for 64-bit and 5.72 percent for 32-bit. What’s more shocking is that there still are plenty of users running Windows XP - 1.47 percent, even though this OS version was launched 15 years ago.

On the other hand, it’s very clear that the majority of users who were eligible for the upgrade to Windows 10 and wanted to perform it have already completed the switch, so it’s hard to believe that any major change in market share will take place in the coming months. Enterprises will help, there’s no doubt about it, but it remains to be seen to what degree.