Windows 8 use among mainstream PC owners is still making very slow gains, according to Net Applications, but the tens of millions of people who have Valve"s Steam game client continue to show they embrace Microsoft"s latest OS on a faster basis. Today"s newly updated Steam hardware survey for May 2013 shows that 12.72 percent of Steam users are accessing the service with either the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows 8.
The hardware survey numbers for May 2013 shows that Windows 8 increased its share on Steam by just more than a full percentage point. In April, Steam"s data showed Windows 8 was used by 11.65 percent of Steam subscribers. Windows 7 is still on top of the May 2013 survey with 66.63 percent, down from 67.57 percent in April.
Windows XP was used by 7.97 percent of Steam subscribers in May, down from 8.63 in April. The number of Steam users still using Windows Vista was listed at 7.25 percent in May, up from 7.06 percent in April. This is the second month of percentage gains for Windows Vista on the Steam survey.
For the past few months, Valve"s survey list has also been displaying all of the versions of the Mac OS X PCs that connect to Steam, along with all of the various operating system that are based on Linux. This month, it appears Valve has decided to just show the top 20 operating systems on the Steam hardware survey, and placing all of the rest in one "Other" category. Thus, we don"t have exact percentages for the OS X and Linux user basis on Steam. However, it does seem clear that the number of Mac and Linux users on Steam are still well below their Windows counterparts.
Source: Steam | Image via Valve