Valve: Windows 11 market share on Steam drops to 41.61%
Valve: Windows 11 market share on Steam drops to 41.61%
Valve published the results of the March 2024 Steam Hardware & Software Survey, revealing the most popular CPUs, GPUs, and operating systems its customers use to play various games.
For those unfamiliar, each month, Valve randomly picks a subset of Steam users and offers them anonymous participation in the survey. ... According to Valve, in March 2024, Windows 11 went down from 41.96% to 41.61%. On the other hand, Windows 10 gained what Windows 11 lost—its market share increased from 54.19% to 54.40%.
Eesh, I dunno. Those are quite small changes and could just be a result of statistical noise, especially given the random sampling.
Not exactly headline worthy, IMO, but it must be a slow news day.
It's a small change, but the trend should be decisively in the opposite direction. New Windows OSs are almost always growing in the market relative to old Windows OSs. This means Windows 11 is not popular and Windows users are avoiding it.
I'm willing to bet it's just the tpm requirement holding off growth. People aren't buying hardware just to install win 11.
This small of a change is probably within a margin of error.
Well, the random sampling makes it less likely it's invalid. Random sampling is pretty much the standard for large groups. As for significance, that's something I'd have to read more to know whether it's high enough to truly matter. There are very well developed rules for this stuff in statistics.
Do you know what the sample size for it is? Probably in the millions i would expect. If thats the case then i dont think 0.3% is just noise, but it also doesnt really show anything of value.
I can't find anything on the sample size. It's not mentioned on the official page, and all the other results are armchair statisticians arguing about it in various forums. I'm guessing they want to keep that data close to their chest.
However, Steam's charts page shows a peak of 34M players online at once over the last few days. A few different sites suggest Daily Average Users are around 60M. Let's call it an even 50M for the sake of argument.
What would a decent sample size be without generating overwhelming amounts of data? Say, 10%? So that's surveying 5M users.
0.3% of 5M is just 15,000 users. What if the survey just happened to pick 15k fewer Windows 11 users this time? Is that so unbelievable?
Damn even with all the efforts from steam, the Linux market share is less than 2 and fairly close to mac.
Change is slow and there aren't many events that convince people to switch.
Also most gamers either buy a PC or build and install Windows in 15 mins, install Steam, and that's requirements met for all gaming. The most frustrating part being the minute or two to setup a Windows profile, or optionally installing a software (once) to ensure latest drivers.
Everything after that short setup is, "I want to play that." click...wait for download... Done. Play now.
If you use your computer for things outside of gaming and average use, I could see the argument appealing to 98% of gamers. But so far, it's clear the stats are not "Gamers would like macOS/Linux" rather, "Some macOS/Linux users game."
Yo thats awesome that's like 1 percent higher then last year
I mean, I don’t know if it realllyyyy matters what the numbers are on paper right now. It matters how realistic it is for the average gamer to actually be happy buying and using Linux gaming hardware… and in my opinion the Steam Deck authoritatively demonstrates that capability, even after only the first generation of devices.
The fact is, it isn’t like most gamers actually like Microsoft it’s just Mac has always been way worse with games… so gaming has developed a default preference for Windows. Microsoft has treated it as its corporate mission to destroy any brand loyalty in gamers by repeatedly shitting on gaming and just assuming the gaming industry will keep choosing to build games for windows without doing anything to actually help foster that (besides anticompetitive sketchy shit probably).
Sure on paper, Linux is still a rounding error, but change can happen very quickly when it is simply a matter of a tipping point being reached, which oh boy if you like tipping points, well the 2020s are going to be chock full of em.
There is a lot of inertia behind windows both in market share and user knowledge that will take a lot to get over. For example a bug part of why I stay on windows is because I'm simply a lot better at using it than Linux so troubleshooting is easier and quicker. Plus I haven't found a distro yet that feels as idiot proof as windows as macos can be.