Nearly 25 percent of Steam users have upgraded to Windows 10

By Mike Flacy Published October 2, 2015

Man wearing headphones and looking at monitor. — Iryna Tiumentseva/Shutterstock

Detailed within the September 2015 Steam Hardware & Software Survey, Windows 10 adoption is continuing to climb quickly among Steam users. Rising up from 17 percent of all Steam users during August 2015, roughly one out of four Steam users have now upgraded to Windows 10. That makes Windows 10 the second most popular operating system among Steam users, still trailing behind Windows 7’s 46 percent share.

Windows 8 lost nearly twice as much market share month over month than Windows 7, essentially falling to third place with slightly less than 22 percent of all Steam users. Of course, Windows remains the dominant overall platform among all Steam users with a 96 percent share. Moving down the list, OS X users make up roughly 3.2 percent of Steam users and Linux clocks in at just under one percent.

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Interestingly, Steam users are much more likely to upgrade to Windows 10 than the rest of the computing population across the world. StatCounter estimates that overall Windows 10 usage climbed to about 7.6 percent in September while the estimation from NetApplications was lower at 6.6 percent. Of course, either figure is significantly less than the adoption rate among Steam users. Windows 10 adoption has also slowed somewhat within the overall population, but continues to rise rapidly among Steam users.

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Regarding the other figures in Steam’s survey, the most popular gaming resolution for Steam users remained at 1080p and the most popular multi-monitor setup was at 3840 x 1080 resolution. The most common internal hardware specifications were 8GB of RAM, a dual-core processor between 2.3 Ghz to 2.69 Ghz in speed and video memory at 1024 MB in size. Nvidia remains the most popular video card among Steam users with a 53 percent share and Intel remains the top CPU manufacturer with a 75 percent share of Steam users.

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