Windows 11 now accounts for more than 30% of PCs worldwide connecting to Valve’s Steam gaming platform.
Steam is a good indicator of the number of PCs running different versions of Windows. It’s geared towards high-end gamers and hardware, but is a decent barometer to gauge trends on Windows since 96% of machines using the service are running some version of Windows.
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Windows 11 adoption among Steam users now stands at 30.33% after reaching 25% in September 2022, compared to 20% in May, when 71% were on Windows 10 and 2.4% on Windows 7 .
Today, Windows 10 fell 63% – 1.96 percentage points lower than a month ago – while Windows 11 grew almost identically – 1.91 percentage points – to 30, 33% of all Windows PCs.
Different versions of macOS account for 2.61% of computers connecting to Steam, while Ubuntu is the top Linux distribution, which collectively accounts for 1.38% of machines.
The survey is voluntary and impacts Steam’s decisions about the technology it invests in.
GlobalStats estimates that Windows 10 represents 68.75% of all Windows PCs worldwide, followed by Windows 11 at 18.13% and unsupported Windows 7 at 9.62%.
Some Windows 10 computers, and probably many other PCs running Windows 7, cannot upgrade to Windows 11 due to the minimum hardware requirements for this version.
As Microsoft recently noted when completing the Extended Security Updates for Windows 7: “Most Windows 7 devices will not meet the hardware requirements for upgrading to Windows 11.”
The tech giant recommended that users who want to keep their old hardware buy a Windows 10 license, but the company stopped selling Windows 10 downloads on January 31, although Windows 10 remains supported until January 14. October 2025.
Some of the new Windows 11 PCs on Steam will be new hardware, although PC and smartphone shipments have dropped over the past year due to economic uncertainty, even for Apple.
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Intel processors remain the most populated on Steam at 67.13%, but fell 0.68 percentage points over the month, while AMD chips rose 0.68 percentage points to 32.84% . Most machines on Steam had 16 GB of RAM, CPU speeds between 2.3 and 2.69 GHz, and six processors. The most popular video card was Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650.
