Windows 11 skips past 50% market share milestone in latest Steam survey

Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system strode past a major market share milestone in August. The newest version of Windows gained an impressive 3.36% market share, according to the newest Steam Hardware Survey data. Thanks to this significant rise, Windows 11 was the OS of choice of over 50% of Steam users in August 2024, or 50.81% of users – to be precise.

Looking closer at the OS popularity data, the growth of Windows 11 in August seems to be entirely from people moving up from Windows 10. As Windows 11 gained 3.36%, Windows 10 lost 3.29% of its Steam user base. Tiny numbers of the remaining Windows 8.1, Windows 7, and ‘other’ devotees also appear to have migrated.

It is pretty big news that Windows 11 has at last gone over 50% in this gamer-centric survey, after nearly three years of availability and heavy promotion. However, Windows 10 isn’t giving up without a fight. In May, we noticed that Statcounter figures were actually showing a small Windows 10 resurgence. This goes against the grain of factors like the difficulty in finding PCs for sale with the older OS installed, being able to buy copies of the older OS, and Microsoft’s pushy sales and upgrade techniques nagging folk to make the switch.

For those still using Windows 10, other than being irked by the constant reminders to upgrade, the end of support for their preferred Windows OS looms troublingly close on the horizon. Microsoft indicates that after October 14, 2025, it “will no longer provide security updates or technical support for Windows 10.” That’s just a little over a year from now. With 48.6% of Windows users still preferring this OS, according to the latest Steam data, there are a lot of people who will have to migrate over a short period.

Considering the wider OS picture, Steam’s latest data shows MacOS share down very slightly to 1.30% in August. Meanwhile, we are a little surprised to see Linux down a smidgen (-0.16%) to 1.92% in August. The open-source OS seems to have enjoyed a notable growth spurt in recent months according to other stats sources like Statcounter. According to that web-based OS tallying source’s trend lines, we might even see 5% of users on Linux by the end of this year, or early next.

There are plenty more interesting nuggets in the latest SHS if you care to take a visit. Other highlights we noted were the uptrend in octa-core and dodeca-core CPUs, while hexa-core systems dipped. Looking at GPUs, Nvidia’s RTX 4060 Laptop GPU was the biggest winner, moving up 1.36% to claim second place in the charts behind the long-time champ we all know as the RTX 3060.