Windows 11 is gaining some decent momentum with gamers, at least going by the latest stats from Steam, although Intel has slipped slightly compared to last month’s Steam survey.
The hardware and software survey for January 2022 showed that Windows 11 is now used in 13.56% of the gaming rigs evaluated for this report, which is up quite strongly on December’s figure of 10.15%.
That’s good news for Microsoft, of course, but the survey produced somewhat disappointing results for Intel on the hardware front.
In December’s stats, Intel actually witnessed an increase in its processor market share among Steam gamers to the tune of 0.82%, with Team Blue securing 69.27% in total.
That looked significant given how dominant rival AMD Ryzen processors have been in recent times, stealing a lot of turf from Intel in the desktop PC world – but the upward movement has ebbed for Team Blue, as it dropped slightly to 69.02% in January 2022, albeit that only represents the loss of a quarter of a percentage point.
Analysis: Nothing too worrying for Intel, and serious momentum building for Microsoft
With the Intel figures, while the chip giant might be slightly disappointed that growth hasn’t continued – and that new Alder Lake CPUs aren’t sparking a continued upswing – it’s not a huge surprise.
This is only a very slight loss for Intel, after all, and in recent times, the figures for Team Blue have been rather up and down anyway (even before Alder Lake came out, we saw some decent upticks with Rocket Lake). Really, this is a pretty minimal downward dip, and could be put down to the typical margin of error that Valve’s survey is doubtless working with.
Windows 11’s progress is a more clearly defined growth spurt, and with an increase of 3.41% for January 2022, that’s almost double the gain Windows 11 witnessed from November to December (1.87%).
In short, there’s a clear suggestion that more and more gamers are making the move to Microsoft’s newest OS, despite the early bugs which we’ve written multiple reports about (mind you, some of these are now fixed up, and it’s not like Windows 10 doesn’t have bugs either).
- Check out our guide to Windows 11 problems and how to fix them
