Windows 11 is making steady progress with gamers, but overall the pace of adoption remains quite slow, according to the latest Steam statistics.
O Steam Hardware Survey for June (opens in new tab) has just been released, and what it shows is that the number of gamers using Windows 11 on Valve’s platform has finally crossed the 20% mark, reaching 21.23% to be more precise.
This represents an increase of 1.64% from the previous month, which means that in the last three months, the market share of Windows 11 on Steam has increased by just under 4.4%, i.e. about 1, 5% per month.
That’s not great, really, considering if you turn the clock back to early 2022, we were seeing increases of 2% and even a 3.4% increase in January.
Windows 10 is still the top operating system used by Steam gamers, unsurprisingly with 71.26%, although it has dropped 2.63% this month (losing market share to Windows 7, which will be a reflection of the composition of the survey, more than anything – as this varies each month).
Analysis: Bigger changes for players are coming
Sure, we can point to jumps of 2% or 3% over previous months, but that was when Windows 11 was new and busy attracting the kind of curious adopters who want to migrate when a platform is still relatively hot off the proverbial press.
Still, we can’t help but feel that the steady progress made in recent times is, as mentioned, slow for Windows 11. Part of this may be a reflection of the technology the new OS offers gamers that aren’t really coming. full enjoyment yet.
Yes, Windows 11 introduces some new features that are live and useful right now, like Auto HDR – which is great for those with an HDR display – and some minor performance tweaks under the hood. But some of the biggest changes for gamers, like DirectStorage, which is expected to make much bigger improvements on Windows 11 systems (compared to what it will do on Windows 10), have yet to be realized. (Actually, DirectStorage is actually working for Windows 11, but no games support it yet – the first will be Forspoken, which will be released in October, in theory).
In terms of tempting gamers to upgrade, DirectStorage will be a much bigger carrot when it comes into play, and so moving forward we should see more considerable spikes in Windows 11 adoption return. Until then, though, it’s likely that the operating system just runs at a steady, uninteresting pace of attracting new users.
Outside of the gaming world, other statistics also indicate a lackluster pace of adoption, which has been a little slower lately. So the overall picture is of an operating system that is struggling to get more people on board at a decent rate. In a broader sense, Windows 11 22H2 could help spark a little more interest, with some useful input changes when it arrives later this year.
