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Tom’s Hardware
Tom’s Hardware
Technology
Jowi Morales

Huge OS and RAM usage swings in Steam Survey likely to have been influenced by China influx

Feb 2025 Steam Hardware Survey Results.

Although the Steam Hardware Survey is never a 100% accurate representation of all Steam users around the globe, it often shows the trends in PC systems, with the January 2025 Steam Hardware Survey results showing users migrating to Windows 11 and GPUs with 8GB of VRAM. However, the latest Steam Hardware Survey for February 2025 seems particularly skewed and features a massive jump in user numbers picking Simplified Chinese as their primary language. We've seen this kind of thing happen before, and it was caused by an internal error that made Steam query cybercafe PCs multiple times, but this might not be the case this time.

The latest survey showed a massive 20.88% increase in Chinese-speaking users, with the language claiming the top spot and putting English in second place at 23.79%. This means that 50.06% of Steam users surveyed prefer Chinese as the language on Steam, which is quite a surprising development. Not because Chinese has become the top language on the gaming platform, but because it happened so suddenly.

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