Steam has been doing an excellent job at reporting about the latest trends in the PC gaming community. Being one of the original platforms that paved way for PC gaming, the platform has an excellent, strong user base. Every month, Steam reports about the latest trends in PC hardware as soon as the next month begins. With November just beginning its journey, Steam has revealed the data they’ve collected from October, and somehow October was a huge trend-setter for the PC gaming market as a whole.
In October, Windows 7 has seen a huge bump in its adoption rate despite WIndows 10’s release two whole years ago. Windows 7 continuously trades blows with Windows 10 and is one of the factors that have been keeping Microsoft from allowing newer PC builds from running Windows 7. Microsoft has done a lot to lock down users to Windows 10, and it definitely seems like a horrible move from Microsoft ever since the release of Intel’s Sky Lake CPUs and AMD’s Ryzen CPUs. While it may be offering Microsoft some benefit from a business point, it definitely isn’t helping PC users at all. Many people with newer hardware have found their ways around this whole fiasco and some of them have found success.
| Windows OS Version | Total Share | Change |
| Windows 7 64 bit | 63.60% | +22.59% |
| Windows 10 64 bit | 28.23% | -17.14% |
| Windows 8.1 64 bit | 3.09% | -2.14% |
| Windows 7 32 bit | 1.86% | -1.12% |
| Windows 10 | 0.37% | -0.24% |
Not only did we see some huge gains on Windows 7, but the we also saw almost as much reduction from Windows 10’s slice of the market share which seems to be disappointing. It almost seems like the 22% increase in Windows 7 adoption came from Windows 10.
The same type of trend also applies to the amount of RAM users. We’ve seen some huge spikes in RAM prices due to the increased memory costs and October 2017 wasn’t an exception to that trend. Despite the high prices, 10.45% of Steam’s users upgraded to 8GB of RAM which is really what most PC gamers should have in 2017.
Steam also revealed that Full-HD displays have taken over Steam’s user base after a 14.72% increase taking the FullHD market share to a whopping 71.51% out of all of Steam’s user base. Meanwhile, 2560 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 displays saw a healthy improvement as well.
| Display Resolution | Total Share | Change |
| 1920 x 1080 | 71.51% | +14.72 |
| 1920 x 1200 | 0.55% | -0.33% |
| 2560 x 1080 | 0.71% | +0.04% |
| 2560 x 1440 | 3.43% | +0.75% |
| 3840 x 2160 | 0.52% | -0.27% |
The Real Reason For These Massive Changes
However, taking a closer look at the language adoptions on Steam, we found that this massive change across all of these categories comes from China’s Steam adoption. Steam recently opened its doors to Chinese gamers where gamers in China were able to access PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds as well as receive Counter-Strike:Global Offensive for free if they verify their identity. This is huge news as the flood from Chinese gamers has brought some amazing improvements throughout the board
| Language | Total Share | Change |
| Simplified Chinese | 56.37% | +26.83% |
| English | 21.24% | -13.40% |
| Russian | 6.20% | -4.13% |
| Spanish | 2.64% | -1.63% |
| Korean | 2.09% | -0.86% |
Not only did the Chinese adoption of Steam bring in a host of changes on the forefront, but the GPU market saw a huge bump in GTX 960s. While we won’t take these for granted this month, it would be interesting how these improvements would play out next month especially with some rumors of PUBG’s possibilities of being banned in China.
It would be interesting to see how well these charts play next month. Although, to get these results to stabilize after the flood, we might have to look into December 2017’s results.
