Windows 11 gained more than 11% in April 2023 on Steam
Valve Software published the Steam Hardware and Software statistics for April 2023 today. Last month saw Microsoft's newest operating system drop by almost 8% and Windows 10 gaining almost 10%.
This month, the tables have turned again. Windows 10 lost more than 12% in April 2023 and Windows 11 gained almost 11% at the same time.
These fluctuations can be explained by the voluntary nature of Steam's hardware and software survey. Randomly selected Steam users may participate in the survey and Valve publishes the information based on the input from these Steam users.
Huge swings, like the ones witnessed in March and April of 2023 could also be caused by bugs, either in the algorithm that selects Steam users randomly or in the code that analyses the data.
The current operating system stats have more or less reversed the data from March 2023. Windows is still the dominating operating system on Steam with more than 96%. Apple macOS devices make 0.99% on Steam and Linux systems have a usage share of 1.32%.
On Windows, Windows 10 dominates with 61.21%, even after its 12% fall in April 2023. Windows 11 is second, with a share of 33.39%, and Windows 7 is third with 1.36% in total.
Valve plans to end support for Windows 7 and 8 on January 1, 2024 and Windows 7 and 8 users get a warning in the client about the end of service.
The operating system charts were not fluctuating alone in April 2023. A look at some of the other charts showed huge swings as well. Here is an overview of what stuck out in April 2023 on Steam:
- Devices with 16 GB or 32 GB of system RAM saw a decrease by 4.73% and 6.31% respectively. Devices with 8 GB benefitted the most, as they gained 6.66% in total in April 2023.
- Devices with 6 physical CPU cores dropped by 12.29%, and devices with 2 or 4 physical cores gained 3.34& and 6.76% in April 2023.
- Devices with more than 1 TB of hard drive space dropped by 18.61%, while devices with lower hard drive space gained the same amount.
- Intel processors dropped by 9.04% while AMD processors gained the same percentage. Intel is still in the lead with its CPUs on more than 67% of all devices, but AMD is closing in with its more than 32%.
Most of the April 2023 stats have in common that they correct some of the huge swings of March 2023. It remains to be seen if this was a one time issue or if next month's stat will show another reversal.
As far as operating systems are concerned, the trend shows a steady increase of Windows 11 at the expense of the now-out-of-support systems Windows 7 and 8, and also of Windows 10.
Now You: which operating system will dominate the charts in 2025?
users who use still win7 do that for a reason. And this exact reason also makes them not to use steam first place (rather GoG or other means to escape the datakraken). So stats on steam about win7 users may be not so representative as media/ms etc want us to believe.
It’s quite nonsense, because it’s like all W7 users have installed W11. Anyway it’s not the same the 11% of 1000 that the 11% of 10, I meant that the reduced amount of W11 makes the percentage quite unusual low. As @basingstoke said above, “i don’t really know how to square this circle”.
Wow, the stats seem to show a genuine conversion of 7 users to 11, on the same hardware!
I don’t really know how to square this circle, those people must be really into gaming on steam, damned be the OS they use to do it.
Only problem is that these people are putting Vista/W7 era hardware onto W11, which is basically a no-win situation: not only is there a good chance the hardware will struggle, but the software sure as heck isn’t going to run too well. On top of this, anyone with a HDD is going to be twice as worse-off due to Superfetch behaviour, and a lot of this hardware may not have drivers for W10/11.
Reminds me of a friend’s house I used to go to around 2017 who had an XP computer – I guess I underestimated how many people don’t care about the PC beyond utilitarian use.