English & Windows 10 gain some Steam

The Steam Hardware & Software Survey for January is out, and it would seem that the Steam community has finally stopped bucking the overall OS market trend: WX's share of Steam users is up, and substantially, from last month, even as Windows' overall share of Steam declined in favour of MacOS:

Interestingly, W7's losses to WX track pretty closely with another trend that Steam Survey watchers have been keeping an eye on in recent months: the rise (and now fall) of Simplified Chinese as Steam users' language of choice:

The last few months' surge in Steam market share of both W7 and Chinese had been attributed to the surging popularity of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) in China.

PUBG is still the top-selling game on Steam, a position that it's now held for nearly a year, and it's unlikely that we'd have heard anything about declining PUBG concurrency numbers, since attention tends to be paid only when concurrency records are being broken, but it's possible that PUBG's popularity has finally cooled the slightest little bit, allowing market norms to reassert among Steam's users. Keep an eye peeled in the coming weeks for stories about PUBG "dying," though, since the other thing that media outlets of all types love is a good "falling from grace"narrative.

Still, it looks like WX is finally starting to climb back towards parity with W7 among Steam users, even as Windows overall loses users to OS X, which is exactly what we see in the broader OS market, too. For a change. This is just one month's data, though, and you know what they say about once being a freak occurrence; I'll want to see three months' of consecutive WX gains in the Steam Software Survey before I'll call this a real trend.

There's no denying that these numbers fit with the overall trend, though. We'll just have to wait and see if the trend continues into next month, or if WX starts to eat into W7's overall market share more in coming months than it's done to date.

Steam's software survey continues to confuse

Steam's software survey has a long history of bucking the trend when it comes to OS market share numbers. When Windows 10 was struggling month to month, and often losing market share to older Windows versions, the Steam community were racing to 50% adoption. And when Windows 10 was actually growing, albeit slowly, the Steam survey showed surging popularity for Windows 7.

Some speculated that this was being driven by PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' popularity in China, a market where Windows 10 isn't even available and Windows 7 is still king. So, does this month's Steam survey, which shows almost every OS version except Windows 7 gaining market share at Win7's expense, mean that PUBG's Chinese bubble has burst?

Betanews has this take on things:

Depending on which analyst firm you believe, Windows 10 is either a whisker away from overtaking Windows 7 as the most popular desktop operating system, or still quite a distance off.

Steam’s monthly usage survey, which shows usage share from the gamers’ perspective, paints an entirely different picture however. It has consistently reported Windows 10 as the top operating system of choice, until recently, when Windows 7 roared into the top spot.

At the same time that Windows 7 gained in popularity, so did the growth of Chinese gamers on the service, which was clearly not a coincidence. If you want future [sic] proof of a link between the two, December’s updated stats help prove it.

In the last month of 2017, Windows 7 had a share of 56.45 percent (made up of 54.79 percent for the 64-bit build, and 1.66 percent for the 32-bit version). In November, its share was a whopping 71.3 percent, meaning it fell 14.85 percentage points in a month.

Also in December, Simplified Chinese -- currently the most popular language on Steam -- fell 15.31 percentage points to 49.04 percent. (Second placed English grew 6.40 percentage points and now sits on 23.42 percent.)

I've been waiting for the PUBG bubble to burst for a while now, as the game's buggy, unpolished reality caught up with the breathless hype of its gaming media coverage, so it should be interesting to see just how closely PUBG's fortunes track with Windows 7's fortunes on Steam over the coming months.

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.