Windows 10 adoption accelerates while Windows Mixed Reality makes inroads on Steam

Windows 10 gaming

Windows 10 has become the clear favorite operating system of the gamers who take part in Steam’s hardware survey, and is fast approaching a 60% market share – not far off twice Windows 7’s share – while Windows Mixed Reality headsets are continuing to make inroads on the virtual reality front.

According to Valve’s stats for June, Windows 10 has accelerated up to 57.38%, a fairly sizeable leap of 1.51% compared to the previous month.

Windows 7 went in the other direction, shedding 1.26% to leave it on a market share of 34.31%. So, you could look at it this way: just a swing of another few percentage points of those users migrating to Windows 10 will see Microsoft’s newest OS hit 60%, and Windows 7 drop to 30%, which will be a major milestone.

If something like the current rate of transition continues, that might only take a few months to happen.

Meanwhile, for June’s figures, Windows 8 versions captured a total of 4.49% share, with Windows XP now close to vanishing on 0.23% (thankfully).

Mixing things up

Virtual reality still isn’t a big thing for PC gamers, at least going by the denizens of Steam, because only 0 .7% of the users surveyed have a VR headset – but that said, it’s interesting to see that Windows Mixed Reality headsets are continuing to perform better.

Microsoft’s headsets have now captured 6.25% of the VR-using population on Steam, which isn’t a huge amount, but it does represent a decent spurt of growth since the start of the year (when we witnessed adoption levels of 4.4%).

The leading headset is the Oculus Rift on 46.26%, with the HTC Vive close behind on 44.56% (so the vast majority of the niche of virtual reality addicts are still using these main two headsets).

It’s a good bet that later this year, we will see some more compelling offers on Windows Mixed Reality hardware – as there are a number of competing devices in this space from various manufacturers – and that could help to stoke sales further. As to when overall adoption of VR headsets will kick up a gear, that’s another, entirely thornier, question…

Via Neowin

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).