This is What Steam Gamers Have Installed on PC

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A lot of BitTorrent users on the legit gamer's gaming service.

As part of its information gathering, Valve has compiled and published the opt-in survey results from Windows users of what sort of software they have installed on their gaming machines.

Steam, naturally, was installed on 100 percent of the machines. Adobe Flash was close with being installed on 96.79 percent of the machines. Then the third most popular software was Adobe Acrobat at 73.18 percent.

Firefox is the clear alternative browser of choice, as it was on 63.05 percent of machines. Chrome, on the other hand, was on 11.56 percent.

Various Microsoft software make up much of the top parts of the list, such as Office, Silverlight, Live Messenger, Games for Windows, and Windows Media Player.

QuickTime was on 43.95 percent, while Skype was on 41.75 percent of PCs.

It also seems that a third of gamers are also BitTorrent users. By far the most popular BitTorrent client is µTorrent at 29.41 percent of machines. The official BitTorrent client has 5.28 percent and BitComet held 2.44 percent.

Check out the full results here.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
76 Comments Comment from the forums
  • LATTEH
    gotta love steam :D
    Reply
  • XD_dued
    Hmmm...I'm not sure how comfortable I am with them being able to find this information. I wonder what else they can see...
    Reply
  • tolham
    only a third of windows users have windows media player installed? i thought that was intertwined with windows.
    Reply
  • isamuelson
    XD_duedHmmm...I'm not sure how comfortable I am with them being able to find this information. I wonder what else they can see...
    You can also look at it from the point of view that they want to see what people run to ensure Steam will work correctly with those other pieces of software and not interfere with them and vice versa: ensure the other apps don't cause issues with Steam.

    I'm not sure if you can or not, but I think you can opt out of Steam collecting and sending information to the Steam servers. I seem to remember this, but it's been so long since I installed Steam.
    Reply
  • Onus
    This was an opt-in survey, not the result of Steam spying on users' computers.
    I'm surprised that Open Office isn't on that list. I'm further surprised that Groove (a collaboration tool) is; makes me think there are a lot of work PCs with Steam installed on them...
    Reply
  • TunaSoda
    I'm not surprised that open office isn't on the list
    Reply
  • cookoy
    Most are pretty standard must-have apps. Adobe Acrobat? Maybe it's the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
    Reply
  • YEP. And that information is for sale.
    Guess what; You guys that Bit-torrent might be in for a surprise when you are targeted by lawyers seeking to skin you for the possibility of software pirating. Note in these cases they DO NOT HAVE TO PROVE YOU ARE GUILTY. They just have to have a suspension.
    Bit torrent client suspicious? To a scummy lawyer YES.
    Reply
  • Tmanishere
    I lol-ed at μTorrent = 29.41%. :D
    Reply
  • randomizer
    43.95% for Quicktime? That's a sad statistic.
    Reply