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

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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China is one of the most populous countries on Earth, so it makes sense to have many people prefer Chinese as their language on the PC. Steam has been available in China since 2021, so we would have expected this jump to happen nearer then, not today. Furthermore, gaming in China is heavily regulated by the government; that’s why users there have a localized version of the platform called Steam China.

However, it seems that the latest Steam Hardware Survey results combined the numbers from both the international and China-only Steam clients. This is the most plausible explanation for this sudden jump in Chinese speakers on the platform, especially as Taiwan and Hong Kong use Traditional Chinese, which only accounts for 1.1% of Steam users.

Massive swings in OS version usage, RAM quotas

Likely because of the sudden influx of Chinese users, we also see some massive swings in other hardware trends. For one, Windows 10 gained a massive 10.47% jump in user numbers despite Windows 11 slowly becoming more popular in the rest of the world as the former is nearing its end-of-life date. Another big change that we noticed is the massive increase in systems with 32GB of RAM, with 46.94% of users packing larger memory. Just last month, 45.07% of surveyed systems only had 16GB of RAM, so this change is also likely brought about by the sudden influx of new systems from China (unless millions of people just had the sudden urge to upgrade the RAM on their systems).

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Aside from that, we also saw a large shift in primary display resolutions, with 1440p displays getting a bump of 9.92%, with 29.98% of surveyed users sporting this resolution. 1080p Full HD screens are still the most popular, at 52.34%, but it seems that more gamers are gravitating towards higher resolutions. This is likely driven by the increase in popularity of GPUs with 8GB and 12GB of VRAM, with both increasing by 7.41% and 4.88%, respectively.

If these massive changes were brought about by users from China, then it seems that gamers from that country are quite serious about their hardware. The popularity of 32GB of RAM, 8 to 12GB of VRAM, and 1440p resolution suggests that this is the sweet spot for most gamers when it comes to their PC specs.

Alternatively, this fluke could have been caused by erroneous reporting data again, similar to what happened to the survey way back in 2018 (linked in the intro). Unfortunately, there's no way for us to track the accuracy of this report, especially as Valve is mum about its survey methodology and doesn't reveal how it got all this data.