14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft started the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update rollout on October 17, but this didn’t impress Steam gamers who have apparently returned to Windows 7 en-masse the last month.
Valve’s latest statistics show that Windows 10 64-bit lost no less than 17.14 percent of its share on the gaming platform, which is pretty much the biggest drop an operating system has ever experienced on Steam. At the same time, Windows 7 64-bit recorded an impressive growth of no less than 22.59 percent, re-becoming the top desktop operating system for gaming with 63.60 percent.
Windows 8.1 is third with 3.09 percent, far away from Windows 10’s 28.23 percent current Steam share, while the 32-bit version of Microsoft’s latest operating system is far behind with 0.37 percent.
For what it’s worth, macOS still doesn’t represent a threat to Windows, as Apple’s operating system is only powering 1.60 percent of the systems used for playing games on Steam. The same thing applies to Linux, as the open-source platform is running on 0.35 percent of the gaming machines.
Chinese users suddenly fell in love with gaming
So what has caused the major drop of Windows 10 on Steam? While there could be many reasons for this sudden decline, including inaccurate data from Valve, it turns out that another substantial share change was experienced in the case of languages being used to play games on Steam.
Last month, English lost the number one language spot dropping 13.40 percent to 21.24 percent, with Chinese going up no less than 26.83 percent to be used on 56.37 percent of the computers that are running Valve’s gaming software.
This could, in turn, be a reason for the sudden increase of Windows 7, as Chinese users are more likely to use the 2009 desktop operating system given the high piracy rate in the country. Coupled with more people giving up on Windows 10, this might have contributed to a major drop experienced by Microsoft’s latest OS despite the arrival of a big new release.