Steam hardware survey for February 2026. What happened? Why did it lose such a big percentage?
2026-03-02 12:17 UTC
Replies (9)
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@Malix@sopuli.xyz 2026-03-02 12:26
could have something to do with the odd, and massive, influx of new win10 users?
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@CameronDev@programming.dev 2026-03-02 12:32
The stats are a sample, there is inheritantly some level of error. Ignore the month to month changes, focus on the longer term trends.
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@eco_game@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-03-02 12:32
store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey All of the results are very odd. If you look through the other categories, Simplified Chinese gained THIRTY percent, the Hard Drive categories also wildly changed, and 32 GB RAM jumped +18%. It seems to me like a bunch of Chinese systems just flooded the statistics.
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@Auster@thebrainbin.org 2026-03-02 12:50
Maybe something to do with work? Afaik by February, most companies are back in action, and so maybe people are forced to switch back to Windows to do their jobs, including in some cases in their gaming rigs due to lack of work-exclusive machines. Also the possibilities others already mentioned here sound as valid, and I second that months may have big fluctuations, but that may not relate to the growth tendency. And iirc GamingOnLinux has a graph on the growth tendency based on Valve's hardware surveys, though I don't have the link with me.
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@HouseWolf@pawb.social 2026-03-02 12:51
It’s due to how Valve conducts these surveys. Rather than pulling from the entire user pool at once, they rotate between different chunks of the userbase every month. You’ll notice this if you look at the system language stats, The Chinese speaking population jumps and falls by a rather large percent every month. This also could explain why Windows 10 had another jump in users this month, From what I hear internet cafes are still a popular way to game in China. and I doubt many of these places have updated all their machines to Windows 11 yet.
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@TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2026-03-02 13:39
I’m no statistician but this seems within margin of error to me.
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@NutWrench@lemmy.ml 2026-03-02 15:17
The Linux Mint upgrade is recent and folks migrated from 22.2 to 22.3 You can see it right in the stats. Don’t know about Ubuntu.
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@ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz 2026-03-02 15:59
GamingOnLinux updated their Steam Tracker with February’s data: www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/ Linux, English Only went from January’s 7.59% to 8.27%. There’s a huge influx of Chinese users in this month’s data.
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@Danitos@reddthat.com 2026-03-02 19:07
Looking at the huge spike in Simplified Chinese number, it seems like yet another oversampling of Chinese computers. A more reliable metric is Linux share computers with English as their language.