Steam’s monthly hardware survey doesn’t give Windows 11 a good report card. Windows 11 will celebrate its one-year birthday in almost exactly two months. Specifically, the release of the latest operating system from Microsoft will be on October 4. Reason enough to take a look at how the successor to Windows 10 is doing. The monthly Steam hardware survey has a small, but by no means underestimated surprise in store:
Windows 11 loses players for the first time since its release. To be precise, its share among Steam users in July 2022 was 21.12 percent, down 0.11 percentage points from the previous month of June. Windows 10, on the other hand, saw a gain of 1.91 percentage points over the same period, leaving it with a still overwhelmingly large 73.17 percent share. But why is Windows 11 losing players instead of gaining them?
Right away: There is no blanket and unambiguous answer to this question. It should also be taken into account that the Steam hardware survey only refers to customers of Valve’s Internet distribution platform and is therefore not representative for all gamers.
At the same time, it’s not entirely clear how high the monthly participation in the survey is – participation is also voluntary. Nevertheless, it has provided us with reliable clues about the hardware and software configurations of a large majority of gamers for years.
Where do the new gamers come from?
Before we look at the possible reasons for switching to Windows 10, let’s take a look at where the new players are coming from in the first place. A small portion of the 1.91 percentage points (up to 0.11 percentage points) may actually be former Windows 11 users, although that could also be within the margin of error since Steam doesn’t survey every single player every month.
If the data is approximately representative, it is rather unlikely that they have migrated to Windows 7/Windows 8 or even Linux or macOS. After all, macOS lost a total of 0.71 percent of its Steam players and Linux only gained 0.05 percent. Since Linux is only used by 1.23 percent of all Steam users anyway, 0.05 percent of that is practically negligible.
At the same time, Windows 7 and 8 are recording slight losses, which is probably why the majority of new Windows 10 users are recruited from their ranks. From the point of view of Windows 11, this is nevertheless alarming. Why does the new operating system not succeed in convincing more gamers?
Why can Windows 11 convince so few?
One reason and possibly even the most serious one could be the many problemsWindows 11 users have recently been confronted with problems caused by faulty updates: After the update KB5015814, for example, some users crashed into an endless restart cycle. Another bug affected Microsoft Outlook, whose search no longer performed its service properly after a Windows update. And the Start menu also stopped working properly in some cases.
Broken start menu after Windows 11 update. How to fix the error quickly and easily
Windows 11 also offers gamers practically no benefit (yet). Theoretically, it is supposed to benefit from a slightly larger feature set in terms of DirectStorage technology, but in practice there are almost no advantages, especially since the storage technology has not been exploited by any PC game yet. Speaking of gaming performance – you can find out what the Ultra Performance Mode in Windows 10 and 11 brings here:
Windows 11 also struggles with many nested menus. For example, to access programs like the Nvidia Control Panel via the context menu (right-click on the desktop), you first have to click on More Options.
Even though it is basically surprising for a new Windows to lose users compared to an older version. In this particular case, however, our surprise is limited!
What is your opinion? What do you think are the reasons why many users are still using Windows 10 and those who have switched to the new operating system seem to be giving it a wide berth? Feel free to write us in the comments!
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