Anomalous Chinese Invasion Distorts Steam’s February Statistics

Steam’s statistics on PC hardware and software used by gamers have never been objective, but a sudden change in the February report disrupted all previously noted trends. For some unknown reason, the presence of Chinese users in the report jumped sharply, bringing significant dynamics to a number of positions.

Image source: steampowered.com

Compared to the January statistics, in February the share of users for whom Chinese (simplified) is listed as the main language increased by 20.88 percentage points and reached 50.06%; English-speaking gamers were second with 23.79%. Such a sudden change may indicate an anomalous nature of the results, as, indeed, does the rest. China is the second most populous country in the world after India; Steam has been available in China since 2021, and a sharp jump in the number of Chinese users was expected around that time, but it only happened now. The gaming industry is tightly controlled by Beijing, so local users install a localized version of the Steam China platform. Presumably, it is no longer so isolated, and in the February report the Chinese segment began to be taken into account in the total number of players. This explanation seems the most plausible, because Traditional Chinese, which is widespread in Hong Kong and Taiwan, has a share of only 1.1% of the platform’s users.

The changes have dramatically changed the disposition of many key indicators. The share of Windows 10 users jumped by 10.47 percentage points, although until now the popularity of Windows 11 has been steadily growing. The number of users with 32 GB of RAM has increased sharply, to a share of 46.94% – in January, 45.07% were content with 16 GB. The share of gamers with 1440p monitors immediately increased by 9.92 percentage points to 29.98%; but 1080p screens remained the most popular, taking up 52.34%. Finally, the shares of video cards with 8 and 12 GB of memory increased by 7.41 percentage points and 4.88 percentage points, respectively. If these large-scale changes were provoked by users from China, then, apparently, gamers from this country are serious about equipping their PCs.

Valve does not disclose the methodology it uses to collect and process statistics, which means that it cannot be ruled out that the February results are some kind of temporary anomaly, and in a month the statistics will be comparable to those of January.