Windows 11's Steam adoption rate has its reached its highest point yet

Windows 11’s adoption rates are surging on Steam, according to the latest data from Valve’s Hardware and Software Survey. Nearly 53% of Steam users are now running Microsoft’s latest OS.

That’s up from around 49% in September and just under 52% in October. In other words, Windows 11 added about 4% to its share last month, while Windows 10 fell by a roughly equivalent amount. Windows 10 now stands at 43.31%, down from 47.46% in October.

The growth was apparently at Windows 7’s expense. Even though Windows 7 can’t run the latest version of Steam, it lost just under 1% share — falling from 0.28% in October to 0.21% in November.

The data suggests that Windows 11’s adoption rate on Steam is partly due to gamers upgrading from Windows 10, possibly because of the OS’s purported performance improvements. It’s worth noting that Microsoft’s Game Mode received a major upgrade in the Windows 11 November 2024 update, with support for more games and the ability to automatically boost the FPS of games that aren’t optimized for the target hardware.

In the November 2024 Steam survey, the share of Linux and macOS users climbed. Linux now accounts for 2.03% of Steam users, up from 1.94% in October, while macOS’s share of the Steam user base increased from 1.39% to 1.41%.

Regarding PC hardware, Valve’s survey found that the most popular PC config on Steam is a system with 16GB of RAM (46.02% of Steam users), a 6-core CPU (31.07%), an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU (4.89%), 8GB of VRAM (35.17%), and a display with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels (55.98%).

While Valve’s data is useful for gauging the distribution of PC users on Steam, it’s not representative of the PC gaming market as a whole. The survey is optional and randomly sampled, and Valve doesn’t disclose the number of participants. Nevertheless, the trend lines are likely directionally accurate.

In September, Microsoft said that Windows 11 had reached 8% adoption among “gaming devices” in the U.S. and 10% adoption among “gaming PCs” in the country. It’s unclear what Microsoft means by “gaming devices” — the company’s definition could include Xbox consoles — but it’s likely that Windows 11 has seen similar traction among gamers in other regions.