Steam Hardware Survey: More than 50 percent of users are on Windows 10

The share of Steam users using Windows 10 has passed 50 percent for the first time. This would appear from figures that Valve has published based on its own research. Windows 7 also has another significant following.

The figures cover December 2016 and only show relative amounts and not absolutes. The survey results show that the 64-bit version of Windows 10 runs on 49.1 percent of respondents’ computers. Just under 1.25 percent runs on 32bit, which brings the total to 50.35 percent. In second place is Windows 7, with a combined 32 and 64 bit percentage of 33.87. Windows 8 has 8.76 percent, Vista 0.19 percent and XP 1.15 percent. From November to December, the share of every Windows OS has decreased except for Windows 10.

Furthermore, the results state that 58.84 percent of the respondents have an Nvidia video card. The GTX 970 is that brand’s most popular video card with copies at 4.64 percent of respondents. 23.28 percent use AMD and 17.41 percent have an Intel GPU.

The numbers come from the Steam Hardware Survey. This is an automatic survey that users are periodically asked to participate in. If a user agrees, information about their hardware and software will be collected and sent to Valve. They are also free to simply click away the request to participate. It is not clear how many respondents completed the surveys. Steam itself had about 125 million users in February of 2015. It is not clear how many of these are also regularly active. In the past 48 hours, there were up to about 14 million users online.

It is striking that NetMarketShare, which gets its figures from visits to 40,000 different websites, reports that the majority of users are still on Windows 7: 48.34 percent. Windows 10, according to them, has a share of 24.36 percent. In November these were 47.17% and 23.72% respectively. That means that Windows 7 not only has a larger share, but also experienced stronger growth than Windows 10 from November to December.