Windows 11 is making steady progress with gamers, but overall the pace of adoption remains very slow according to the latest stats from Steam.
Scan Steam Devices for June (Opens in a new tab) It just released, and what it shows is that the number of gamers using Windows 11 on the Valve platform has finally crossed the 20% mark, reaching 21.23% to be exact.
That’s a 1.64% increase from the previous month, which means that over the past three months, Windows 11’s market share on Steam has gone up just under 4.4%, an average of 1.5% per month.
That’s not really great, considering that if you turn back the clock to the start of 2022, we saw increases of up to 2% and even a 3.4% increase in January.
Windows 10 is still the main operating system used by Steam gamers, unsurprisingly, sitting at 71.26%, despite down 2.63% this month (it lost some market share to Windows 7, which would be a reflection of the configuration of poll., more than anything – as that varies every month).
Analysis: Bigger changes for players will come in the future
Of course, we could point to the likes of 2% or 3% jumps in previous months, but that was back when Windows 11 was new and busy attracting the kind of curious early adopters who are keen to migrate when the platform is still relatively hot from the press hitting It has a proverb.
However, we can’t help but feel that the steady progress that’s been made lately is, as mentioned, on the slow side for Windows 11. Some of that might be a reflection of the technology the new OS offers gamers that aren’t really coming full fruit yet.
Yes, Windows 11 has some new lively and useful goodies right now, like Auto HDR – which is great for those with an HDR screen – and some minor performance tweaks under the hood. But some of the biggest changes for gamers, like DirectStorage, which is set to make much bigger improvements for Windows 11 systems (compared to what it would for Windows 10), haven’t materialized yet. (In fact, DirectStorage is already running for Windows 11, but no games support it yet—the first of which would be Forspoken which debuted in October, in theory).
In terms of enticing gamers to upgrade, DirectStorage will be a much bigger carrot when it comes to gameplay, so, in the future, we should see the return of more significant heights in adoption for Windows 11. Until then, though, it’s likely that the OS will It will keep pace with a steady and uninteresting pace to attract new users.
Outside of the gaming world, other stats also point to a lackluster adoption pace, which has been rather slow lately. So, the overall picture is that of an operating system that is struggling to get more people on board at an appropriate pace. In a broader sense, Windows 11 22H2 may help spark interest a bit more, with some useful changes coming when it arrives later this year.