Apr 03, 2026 14:30:00

Unusual activity in Steam hardware surveys, possibly due to the arrest of a user in China for using a VPN.

Steam regularly surveys users' hardware and software environments and publishes the results monthly. The results for March 2026 showed significant changes.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined

The top result of Steam's survey is the OS market share. The number on the far right is the month-on-month change, and it appears that Windows 11 has increased by more than 10%, suggesting a rapid shift from Windows 10. It also appears that Linux's market share has more than doubled.

However, looking at the language used section, the use of simplified Chinese characters, which are used in mainland China, decreased by 31.85%. Previously, about half of the users were Chinese speakers, but that share has fallen to about 23%.

In China, users are required to use

the Chinese version of Steam , which only allows them to play government-censored titles. However, some users who dislike this use VPNs to access the international version of Steam. On March 11, 2026, it was announced that two men had been fined for using VPNs without authorization.

In fact, looking at the connection trends for 'Dota 2,' a game popular in China with a world championship scheduled to be held in Shanghai in 2026, the number of connections plummeted around March 11th. This suggests that the incident is affecting Steam users within China.

Considering this, it seems more likely that the shift to Windows 11 in March didn't happen all at once, but rather that since Steam users in China were primarily using Windows 10, the drastic decrease in access from within China simply made it appear as though the OS's market share had plummeted.

Similarly, we can infer the general specifications of PCs used by Steam users in China from other categories as well. For example, looking at the data on installed memory, it appears that 16GB has increased sharply while 32GB has decreased sharply, which makes sense if we assume that Steam users in China were mainly using PCs with 32GB of memory.

In terms of monitor resolution, Full HD is increasing while Quad HD is decreasing. It appears that many Steam users in China were using Quad HD monitors.

While Windows boasts an overwhelming 92% share on Steam,

statistics from Cloudflare, a CDN service provider , show Windows with a 74% share, macOS with 21%, and Linux with 3.3%.