Windows 11 finally did it and managed to overtake Windows 10 in terms of market share among PC gamers.
As you might have guessed, this is the Steam Hardware Survey that runs every month and is a snapshot of the configurations of the various gaming PCs used on Valve's platform.
August 2024 figures show that Windows 11 has gained 3.36% of Steam users, bringing the total to 49.17%.
Windows 10 fell by a proportional amount, dropping 3.07% to end at 47.09% for the month, so there are now 2% more gamers on Windows 11 than on its predecessor.
Other versions of Windows are practically insignificant on Steam. Windows 7 is the only OS worth mentioning, but even that OS only has 0.37% adoption. Outside of Windows, Linux has a 1.92% share of players and macOS accounts for 1.3%.
Windows 11 accounted for 46.63% of Steam players in June and 47.45% in July, and has been increasing in jumps of a percentage point, or half a percent, of late, so this is pretty big growth for August.
Analysis: Sudden increase
In short, we weren't expecting Windows 11 to overtake Windows 10 so quickly. Is there a particular reason for the sudden surge? I can't think of any, though it could simply be that the urge to stop using Windows 10 feels a little more pressing now that there's not much more than a year left before the older OS reaches its end of life (in October 2025).
If you look at just Windows versions on Steam, Windows 11 now has just over 50% of that market.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, this progress is not even remotely reflected outside the gaming world. For users overall, according to Statcounter, Windows 11 has 31.6% of users in August, compared to 64.1% for Windows 10, so the latter still has twice as many users as the former; it’s not even close.
Microsoft expects the overall landscape to change radically over the next year, that's for sure, and AI will be a big part of that push, specifically in Copilot+ PCs that are expected to do big things in terms of unit shifting.
