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Steam Survey shows AMD Market Share falling due to PUBG

AMD market share and PUBG

Steam’s monthly hardware survey shows a sharp decline in AMD market share of CPUs and graphics cards. The data collected also provides the underlying reason for this, which is apparently the popularity of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) in China.

AMD Market Share plummets below 10% on Steam

AMD’s CPU share on Steam fell from 22.8% to 8.3% between the months of June and November. Similarly, their graphics card share decreased from 25.1% in June to just 8.8% last month. Especially, AMD lost significantly during the past few weeks against competitors Intel and Nvidia.

READ ALSO: AMD Raven Ridge desktop APUs and Ryzen Refresh set for March 2018 Launch

AMD market share (Steam's November survey)

The video card detail page shows the competitors to RX Vega 65 and 56, such as GeForce GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, also lost user share on Steam. The cards that gained significant market share include the GeForce GTX 750, GTX 750 Ti, GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, and many other older GPUs.

The timeline coincides with PUBG’s early access period, around the same time when the proportion of native Chinese speakers increased by 8.23% on Steam platform. A possible conclusion is that the huge number of Chinese players had mid-range Nvidia cards.

The survey also shows the Radeon RX 460 and RX 480 listed in very low percentages, while the RX 470 and RX 500 series cards are strangely missing. We know that the mid-tier Polaris-based cards are quite popular among the cryptocurrency community, but have miners snatched all the cards up? Or, it could be the survey misrecognizing GPUs.

It’s not only the decline in AMD market share which came as PUBG effect, but Windows 10 also lost its crown as the most popular OS for Steam gamers. Steam’s October survey showed nearly two thirds of gamers using Windows 7. As of the latest analysis, Windows 7 now holds a 72.5% share while Windows 10 is at 24.34%.

Steam's November hardware survey: Windows 7 vs 10 share

It’s not like the users ditched Microsoft’s latest OS in droves, but as stated above, it all comes down to the explosion in popularity of PUBG in China. According to SteamSpy, China represents around 80% of the total player count.

While the game remains popular among Chinese players, it faced the prospect of a ban from govenment for deviating from the country’s “socialist core values.” The matter has since been resolved, with Tencent now gaining an exclusive license to publish PUBG in China.

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