Steam's perplexing software survey

With Windows 7 gradually declining, and Windows 10 slowing gaining, in the overall OS marketplace, it should come as no surprise at all that VALVe's Steam user base is moving in the opposite directions. As reported by MSPowerUser:

Gaming network Steam has released their hardware survey numbers for the month ending October 2017 and like many numbers in recent months, it does not read as good news for Microsoft’s latest operating system.

The numbers show a massive drop in the usage of Windows 10 amongst gamers, down 17.14% from last month, with Windows 7 surging 22.59% [...] this has actually been a trend for at least the last 3 months and appears to be accelerating.

Steam's gamers embraced Windows 10 much more quickly than the OS market as a whole, especially during its first year of release, so it's unclear why they seem to be moving so sharply in the other direction now, although PC Gamer attributes it to "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' popularity in China."

While the numbers above look frightening for Microsoft, especially with its renewed focus on PC gaming with Windows 10, a look at the language stats reveals what is almost certainly happening. Simplified Chinese shot up nearly 27 percent in October. It now consists of more than half of the user base, while English dropped 13.4 percent in the same month, landing at 21.24 percent.

Bluehole has sold more than 13 million copies of PUBG globally, with growing interest from Chinese gamers. China, which has reportedly considered banning PUBG, represents the game's biggest region by player population [...] It's possible that some users have also downgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 7, but the bulk of that OS shift is down to PUBG's insane growth in China.

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds is currently something of a phenomenon in PC gaming, but I seem to detect a whiff of the same pre-existing narrative that I've blogged about previously. Although it also bears mentioning that it's not good news for Microsoft for China, a huge market, to still be so devoted to Windows 7 that it skews Steam's software survey results when more Chinese players join up; even if PC Gamer's hypothesis is correct, it's not necessarily good news for the Redmond crew.

I suppose time will tell; with competitors like Epic Games' Fortnite also throwing their hats into the Battle Royale game genre's ring, we should eventually see PUBG start to slow some of its meteoric growth, at which point we'll know if the Steam software survey is tracking PUBG's trajectory. I can't help but think that Win10's Game Mode, which breaks games and isn't fixed yet, might also have something to do with this trend, though.

Game mode sucks, and Microsoft have finally admitted it.

Back when Game Mode was first announced for Windows 10, I predicted that it would have very little impact, if any, on Steam gamers, who were not playing native-UWP versions of their games via the Windows Store. I was wrong about that; rather than having little-to-no impact, it turned out that Game Mode actually hurt game performance. Microsoft, naturally, reacted by denying that anything was wrong, and then doing the PR equivalent of covering their ears and saying, "LA LA LA LA LA," as loudly as possible.

That was back in January. It is now September, and Microsoft are finally admitting the problems with the Creators Update, which included Game Mode.

As reported by Usama Jawad at NeoWin:

For the past few months, hundreds of users have lamented the stuttering issues and FPS drops in various games after installing the Windows 10 Creators Update. Users also reported that clean installing drivers, and enabling or disabling Game DVR and Game Mode does not fix the issue.

Now, Microsoft has finally acknowledged the problem, stating that it is looking into the factors that can potentially be causing games to stutter.

[...]

A Microsoft engineer has acknowledged the issue on Feedback Hub, saying that:

Thank you everyone for providing feedback and submitting traces. We have been analyzing the traces from your feedback and have identified several different problem sources surfacing as stutter in games. We have a fix for one of them in the Windows Insider build that flighted to the “Fast” ring (build 16273 and above). You can find instructions on joining the Windows 10 Insider Program here: https://insider.windows.com/en-us/how-to-pc/. We are actively investigating the remaining stutter causes and appreciate your patience on this issue.

So, +1 to Microsoft for finally admitting that the problem exists, but -1 for denying it originally, -1 for spending months stonewalling while customers complained, and -1 more for not having actually fixed the problem yet (the end-of-August patch fixed one potential issue which might be contributing to the problem, but it hasn't addressed the entirety of the issue, which they're still "investigating"). Again, this is seven months after the problem was reported to them by their customers.

The Steam software survey has showed Windows 10's usage share faltering among Steam users over the last couple of months, a perplexing trend that ran counter to the movement in the OS market at large. At the time, those monthly shifts among Steam users didn't make much sense, but that's because I'm a Windows 7 gamer, who isn't affected by Microsoft's Game Mode and who had (blissfully) forgotten all about its existence. Now that I've been reminded of these game-specific issues, though, everything makes so much more sense.

I keep waiting for Microsoft to show some sign that they're learning from their mistakes. I don't know whether to be entertained or depressed by their continued failure to do so.

Windows 10 losing Steam

Microsoft's addition of a Game Mode to Windows 10 doesn't seem to be winning the hearts and minds of PC gamers. At least among Steam's user base, the latest stats show the OS declining in popularity.

From Softpedia:

The free Windows 10 upgrade promo that Microsoft offered in the first 12 months after the launch of the operating system had a massive contribution to its growth, especially in the gaming industry where the majority of users upgraded their computers.

On Valve’s Steam, for example, Windows 10 improved at a really fast pace, overtaking Windows 7 as the number one operating system for PC gaming.

But figures provided by the company for the month of January 2017 reveal something that almost nobody could see coming: Windows 10 has started declining just when it was so close to reaching 50 percent share.

Specifically, Windows 10 dropped 0.48 percent last month to 48.49 percent, but it continues to remain the preferred desktop operating system right now on the gaming platform. Windows 7 64-bit is the runner-up with 29.74 percent, up 0.72 percent over the previous month, while Windows 8.1 64-bit is far behind with 8.14 percent, down 0.31 percent.

The 32-bit version of Windows 10 lost market share as well and is currently at 1.18 percent, down 0.04 percent from December 2016.

For whatever reason, Steam was the one market where Windows 10 really had managed to overtake Windows 7 as the top choice of PC users, and this month's change is small enough (<0.5%) that it could just be a transient blip. But even if this isn't the start of some kind of trend, it does send a clear signal that the easy Windows 10 converts among PC gamers have all been converted; from here, it gets only harder for Microsoft to win new converts.

It's also noteworthy because this is, once again, the opposite of what the overall OS market is doing. Just as Steam bucked the trend for Windows 10 adoption until now, with gamers switching to the new OS faster than PC users at large, Steam is now bucking the trend again, retreating from Windows 10 just as the new OS finally starts to make gains in the OS market overall.

This may be why Game Mode was rolled out so early: i.e. before it's actually working, or at least before it's working well enough to actually produce performance gains for non-UWP games. Microsoft seemed to be concerned about Windows 10 adoption stalling out among users who had been the first to embrace the product, a concern which now looks like it might be justified. It's unlikely that Windows 7 will regain enough market share among gamers to regain the top spot, especially now that it's not available for sale anymore, but if Microsoft are serious about reaching out to Steam gamers and keeping them on Windows 10, they're apparently going to need to do better than "GFWL2."

Win10's Game Mode fails to improve game performance

Windows 10's latest build of the Creators Update has been released to Insiders, including the recently-announced (and much-hyped) Game Mode, and curious PC gaming Insiders started testing it almost immediately, with results that I consider to be entirely predictable. Only hours after it went live, and in increasing numbers since then, articles started surfacing, all of them saying basically the same thing: Windows 10's new Game Mode does not do much of anything, as far as anyone can tell.

Por ejemplo, take this assessment from Dark Side of Gaming:

Game mode is a feature that a lot of PC gamers were looking forward to. This mode is available in the latest Windows 10 Insiders Build, however it appears that it does not offer any performance improvement at all.

Microsoft claimed that it targets to improve performance via two ways with Game Mode: a) an increase overall framerate or peaks and b) an increase in average framerates or consistency.

A number of PC users got their hands on this build and according to some early tests, Windows 10’s Game mode is a big letdown as it did not actually offer any performance improvement at all.

What follows is details of tests using actual games "in the wild," some with video evidence, showing no performance improvements at all.

A more rigorous test by Laptop showed basically the same result:

To test Game Mode, we put the latest Insider Build on the Asus ROG Strix GL753 with a 2.8-GHz Intel Core i7-770HQ CPU, 16GB of RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU with 4GB of VRAM, a 256GB M.2 SSD and a 1TB, 5,400-rpm hard drive. Then, we ran some of our standard benchmark tests with Game Mode enabled.

The results were mixed, at best. While all of the games we tested recognized Game Mode, we only saw one noticeable performance improvement.

The GL753 played Grand Theft Auto V (very high settings) at 31.22 frames per second, just surpassing our 30-fps threshhold to be considered playable and higher than the 28-fps it achieved without Game Mode.

But in Hitman (very high settings) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (configured for a budget setup), we didn't see any noticeable changes. Our benchmarks ran within decimal points of previous scores.

This is not surprising for me; after all, I'd already predicted that Game Mode would have effectively zero impact on actual gamers' experiences. 

For one thing, it really is more about UWP games than about Win32 (i.e. Steam, Origin, GoG, UPlay, etc.) executables, While Microsoft claims that Win32 games will be supported by Game Mode, they are architected differently from UWP applications (that uniformity of architecture is the entire point of UWP, after all), and may need to be grandfathered into Game Mode literally one game at a time. If that's true, then Game Mode support will be like game-specific GPU driver support: nice for games that have it, but useless for almost all other games.

For another thing, the performance enhancements are mostly supposed to come from de-prioritizing non-essential services and applications, but most PC gamers keep very few extraneous programs on while gaming, anyway, and running on at least 6 or 8 processor cores to boot, which means that prioritizing the game doesn't actually mean much, in practice. Only live-streamers have a lot of extra program load to worry about when gaming, and they've mostly invested in beastly rigs that can handle the extra load.

So... as expected, Game Mode is more of a PR stunt than an actual feature. It doesn't break anything, at least, which is more than can be said for some of Microsoft's previous efforts in this direction, but it's not game-changing in any sense at all, at least so far... and, let's face it, if it isn't offering significant performance benefits to at least the 100 or so most popular Win32 games right out of the gate, it probably won't get used later on, even if Microsoft manage to improve it. You only get one chance to make a first impression; the fact that Microsoft is willing to let Game Mode's first impression be so lacklustre says a lot about their current level of desperation. 

It's like Microsoft were hoping that the promise of a performance-enhancing Game Mode will move gamers to Windows 10 before the mode even goes live, and whether or not it provides any actual enhancements to game performance. Honestly, I think they're more likely to gain new Windows 10 "converts" in the PC gaming community just from gamers buying new PCs.

Why I don't expect much from Microsoft's new "gaming mode"

I've been seeing reports about this for at least a week, now, and was waiting for Microsoft to confirm its existence before weighing in.

Well, it looks like they've finally confirmed it, according to Softpedia:

Microsoft has officially acknowledged that it’s working on a gaming mode for Windows 10 that would have the operating system prioritize resource allocation for certain processes, while putting less critical ones in standby mode to improve gaming performance.

The recently-released Windows 10 build 15007 came with an early implementation of the so-called Game Mode, but just we told you yesterday, it doesn’t do much at the moment.

After the company remained tight-lipped on its efforts to launch a game mode, a post on the Xbox blog this morning set things straight and officially confirms that such a feature is in the works.

“Our goal is to make Windows 10 the best Windows ever for gaming. With the Creators Update, we’re introducing a new feature called Game Mode,” Microsoft says.

“Windows Insiders will start seeing some of the visual elements for Game Mode this week, with the feature being fully operational in builds shortly thereafter. Our vision is for Game Mode to optimize your Windows 10 PC for increased performance in gaming. This is a big update for Windows; we’re looking forward to Insiders getting their hands on this new feature for further testing, and we’ll have much more to share on what it is and how it works soon, so stayed tuned.”

So, what does this really mean for gamers?

First, you can expect this to affect UWP games only.

Seriously, I'll bet money on this: Game Mode will optimize for UWP only, and not be accessible for normal executables like you get from, e.g., Steam. Since UWP games currently perform worse than their Steam (or Origin, or BNet, or UPlay, or GOG) counterparts pretty much across the board, this won't mean boosted performance for games in Windows 10 so much as long-overdue parity between native UWP games and games bought from other platforms.

You can expect this to make little difference, if any, to how PC gamers buy their games.

It might help sales of Microsoft titles launched on Windows 10, but since it won't affect Steam games at all, don't expect gamers to abandon Steam for the Windows 10 Store for their game purchases. Microsoft dropped the ball when it came to the UWP gaming experience, resulting in bad experiences for most of the native UWP titles released to date, from missing functionality and sub-par performance in games like Quantum Break to miserable sales and resulting non-functional multiplayer in Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. That bad taste won't be going away anytime soon.

Since Game Mode isn't going to improve Steam users' gaming experience with the Steam games they already own and play, most of them probably won't even notice the difference. And since most of those same users are already thoroughly turned off the Windows 10 store already after a number of sub-par or outright terrible game purchasing experiences, I'm not expecting them to stampede to the Windows 10 Store in order to buy native UWP games with which to test Windows 10's new Mode.

Don't expect developers to start developing native UWP versions of games.

With gamers reluctant to drop cash on native UWP versions of new games, developers will have little, if any, incentive to spend extra money making and optimizing native UWP ports of their titles. It's much easier and cheaper to use the Centennial Bridge to simply put a UWP wrapper around a Windows 7/8 executable in order to get it on the Windows 10 store front; and since Game Mode isn't going to optimize performance for anything except native UWP games (seriously, count on it), games ported over via the Bridge won't benefit.

This was part of Microsoft's UWP strategy, remember: the extra cost of developing native-UWP software was supposed to combine with the year-long free giveaway of Windows 10 to push developers into developing native UWP games at the expense of Windows 7/8 (i.e. Steam) versions, making the UWP marketplace larger and thus more attractive to developers wanting to maximize profit while minimizing costs. Bur Windows 10 Mobile was a big part of that, and subsequently failed to happen, while GWX turned Windows 7 & 8 users off completely, meaning that UWP only reaches 25% of the PC market, and isn't actually a better bet than just releasing a normal executable.

Add in UWP's gaming-specific issues, and you get a failure to launch in spite of Windows 10's remarkable penetration of the Steam user base (well above its share of the PC market as a whole), and a pretty clear sign of how badly Microsoft have fucked this up. Most Steam users are using Windows 10, but very few of them seem to be using the Windows 10 Store for their gaming purchases, and even those few are only using Microsoft's storefront to buy Microsoft-published games. The only developers who aren't going to Steam, i.e. where the players are, are those who are trying to push players to their own, competing, storefronts; EA is unlikely to promote Microsoft's walled Windows 10 garden over their own Origin service.

Bottom line:

Unless Microsoft make Game Mode optimization available to non-UWP games, don't expect Game Mode to have much of an impact on the games you play, or the way you buy games in future. That makes Game Mode a nothingburger -- a weaksauce feature that Microsoft is bringing to the table a good year and a half too late to make any difference.

UPDATE:

It might be a good thing that nobody took me up on that bet, because Microsoft are now saying that Game Mode will work with both Win32 and UWP games, at least according to Racing Junky:

Microsoft just revealed everything identified with gaming that is expected with the Creators Update. They began with the rumored Windows 10 Game Mode. Mike Ybarra, Head of Platform Engineering for Xbox, affirmed that Game Mode will be accessible for both Win32 and UWP games.

Mike Ybarra likewise said that upgrades to the Windows Store, still disliked by numerous gamers, are accompanying this release and others later on. As per the blog entry, Windows Insiders will begin seeing the principal visual components (likely UI related) of Game Mode in an upgrade coming soon. Furthermore, the element will turn out to be completely operational in consequent forms. It will likely improve execution while gaming. Microsoft didn’t give more subtle hints on how it intends to accomplish that objective. Be that as it may, they said all of it will be talked about soon.

Whether Microsoft can still convince gamers to ditch Steam for the Windows 10 Store remains to be seen (although I think it's unlikely), but the UWP gaming experience certainly needs a lot of work, and if Game Mode improves the experience for Steam &c. gamers as well, then it might have more of an impact than I'm expecting.

Of course, it may just kill non-UWP game streaming at the same time, if it undermines all background applications in favour of the game in the foreground, so I'm still not completely sold, but I'm now a little more interested in what the details will ultimately end up being. Because the devil is in the details, and Microsoft have a long history of failing at the details of PC gaming, going all the way back to Games for Windows Live.

Other reasons not to get too excited about Game Mode being enabled for Win32 games:

1. Win32 might only mean XBox 360 backwards-compatible titles through Play Anywhere, and not 64-bit Windows 7 & 8 titles through Steam; in order to include current-gen Steam titles, Game Mode will also need to apply to Win64;
2. I've been unable to find a 2nd source quoting Mike Ybarra's supposed confirmation of Win32's inclusion in Game Mode;
3. Mike Ybarra is the head of platform engineering for XBox, and not directly responsible for PC;
4. The Game Mode feature is still under development, so many of its details are still To Be Determined.

If Game Mode works for Win32 games, and if it improves performance for, e.g., Steam gamers, without undermining their ability to stream games to the likes of Twitch, then it could be a good thing for gamers. But if it just turns PC gaming into a more restrictive, XBox-like experience, then it could be every bit the nothingburger that I'm currently anticipating.

Your move, Microsoft. You've disappointed me over and over again for the last two years, so my expectations are pretty low, here. Time to impress me, and other users and gamers like me.