The figure comes from a Steam hardware survey conducted by the platform’s owner, Valve. Back in December we reported that Windows 10’s share on the game streaming service. Earlier this year, that share topped the 50% mark for the first time. Since then, Windows 10 share slipped back down to 48.77% in February. It could be argued that the actual percentage figure is not important when the swing is only a few percentage points. Also, Windows 10 is comfortably the most used platform on Steam, whether it has 51% or 48%. Indeed, Microsoft’s OS in general is the dominant platform for Steam users, according to Valve’s survey. The company points out Windows 7 is down to 34.74%, likely because of Windows 10’s improvement. Overall, Windows dominates the streaming service, with 96.05% of all Steam users coming from the platform. From Windows 10, 50.15% are using the 64-bit version, while 1.05% are using the 32-bit version. Microsoft has also taken some share from Apple is seems. Cupertino’s OS X slipped to 3.11%, while the open source Linux stays stagnant at 0.77%.
Hardware Use
Valve conducts its surveys by asking Steam users to opt in if they want to. This means the company is not looking at every device on its platform. Instead, the users who want to take the survey offer a cross section of the user base. Still, it is likely that the figures are fairly representative of what is happening across Steam. The company also reports on what are the most common hardware configurations on the gaming service. In terms of display technology, users are unsurprisingly still using 1920×1080 (Full HD) resolution most frequently. Multi-monitor setups are favouring 3840×1080. The most consistent memory configuration is 8GB of RAM.
