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Windows 7 Now The Most Popular OS on Steam Thanks to PUBG and China

Chinese PUBG players for Win7

Last month, we reported about increase in Windows 7 market share on Steam but Windows 10 was still the most dominant OS at the time. The two OSes have finally swapped places as Steam’s October survey shows Windows 7 as the most popular OS with nearly two thirds of gamers using it.

The latest Steam hardware and software survey indicates that Windows 10 is down 17.38% in the month of October to a 28.6% share. At the same time, Windows 7 jumped 21.47% to a total share of 65.46%.

Windows 7 most popular OS on Steam

Well, as we mentioned in our previous report, the sudden resurgence of Windows 7 doesn’t mean gamers are ditching Windows 10 in droves, but can be explained by the explosion in popularity of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds in China.

Let’s take a look at the Steam OS launguage stats for the same month. It shows simplified Chinese rose by 26.83% up to more than half of the user base. Meanwhile, all other languages practically saw a decrease, especially English which dropped 13.4%.

Steam OS language Survey October

How is this related to PUBG, though? Well, China represents the game’s biggest region by player count. According to data from Steam Spy, PUBG saw a roughly 600% increase in Chinese player count from around 1 million players in August to around 6 million as of October.


PUBG came out in March as an unfinished product, yet more than 13 million people have purchased it globally. Just last month, the game hit 2 million concurrent players on Steam, surpassing Dota 2’s previous best of 1.3 million.

In other words, Windows 10 losing its crown as the most popular OS for Steam gamers all comes down to PUBG’s insane growth in China. It seems that Chinese players are trying to make the most of it amid reports of their government considering to ban PUBG, as the game is deemed to deviate from the country’s “socialist core values.”

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