Explain why gamers adopt Windows 11 more slowly than Windows 10

There was a time shortly after the release of Windows 10 when Microsoft would regularly release specific adoption numbers, effusive at how quickly the then-new free update was adopted by users of Windows 7 and Windows 8. The company has not repeated that strategy for Windows 11, leaving we rely on third-party data to see how quickly people pick up the new operating system.

We collected the Steam Hardware & Software Survey data for a few months and compared it with the months immediately following the release of Windows 10. This data is imperfect and inevitably a bit noisy – Steam users must voluntarily submit the data – but the difference in acceptance is large enough to be able to draw at least some conclusions.

Windows 11 was released to the public in October 2021 and Windows 10 was released in July 2015. In both cases, we used the Internet Wayback Machine to dig up seven months of data, including the month immediately before the release of each operating system. We mapped the usage figures for 64-bit versions of the operating systems (32-bit versions, along with versions such as Vista and XP, are merged into “other”), combining the figures for Windows 8.1 and 8.0.

As a result, Steam users migrate to Windows 11 about half as fast as they transitioned to Windows 10. Six months after its release, Windows 10 was running on 31 percent of all Steam computers — nearly one in three. As of March 2022, Windows 11 will run on just under 17 percent of Steam computers, about one in six. Three quarters of all Steam computers in 2022 will still be running Windows 10.

It’s easy to interpret these results as an indictment of Windows 11, which caused some controversy with its relatively strict (and often poorly explained) security-oriented system requirements. At least some of this slow adoption is caused by those system requirements – probably many of the PCs examined by Steam can not install Windows 11. That could be because users have an older unsupported CPU or have disabled one or more of the required security features; Secure Boot and the firmware TPM module were often disabled by default on new motherboards for years.

But there are other compelling explanations. Windows 11 adoption looks slow compared to Windows 10, but Windows 10 adoption was also exceptionally good.

Windows 8 and 8.1 weren’t much loved, to say the least, and Windows 10 was designed as a response to (and a solution to) most of the changes to the Windows 8 user interface. And people still running Windows 7, missed out on some of the nice quality of life additions and under-the-hood improvements Windows 8 had added.

You can see that pent-up demand in the jump between July 2015 and September 2015. In the first two months of Windows 10’s availability, Windows 8 users bled back, from about 35 percent usage to 19 percent. Virtually all of those users — and a smaller but still notable portion of Windows 7 users — moved to Windows 10. Windows 11 also got a decent early adopter bump in November 2021, but the two-month gains were much smaller.

In contrast, Windows 11 was announced with little lead-up and it replaced what users were told was the “latest version of Windows”. Where Windows 10 replaced one new, unloved operating system and one beloved but outdated operating system, Windows 11 replaced a modern operating system that no one really complained about (Windows 10 ran on more than 90 percent of the time). all Steam computers in September 2021 — even Windows 7 in its heyday couldn’t boast of that kind of adoption).

It’s also worth noting that Microsoft not done‘t try recreating that first burst of adoption for Windows 11. After some turbulence after early Windows 10 maintenance updates, Microsoft started rolling out updates more methodically, starting with a small number of PCs and then gradually expanding availability as issues were discovered and fixed. Windows 11 didn’t go into “last phase of availability” until February, so anyone with a compatible PC could get Windows 11 through Windows Update if they wanted to.