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Comment by Zr40 | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe XP is still being used as primary gaming OS by 8.35% of Steam users.

Are so many gamers still using ancient hardware incapable of running Windows 7 or 8? Or are they unwilling or afraid to upgrade?

At least, XP usage has dropped by 0.62 percentage points since the month before. Since this rate will likely decrease, XP will not be gone in less than 14 months.

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XP is perfectly fine for most games. The advantages of Windows 7 are pretty minor and you can still get current drivers for XP.

I'm sure there's a lot of people that run Boot Camp and boot into XP just for games and see no reason to pay for an upgrade to Windows 7.

I'm not all that surprised. Steam carries bleeding-edge games, sure, but it also has a large catalog of older and indie games that don't require much hardware horsepower. Newer indie games like Faster than Light or Dungeons of Dredmor could easily run on an old machine.

The number seems to be misreported as someone else mentioned here, but still, you'd be surprised how lazy people can be when it comes to (large) OS updates. There's an enormous amount of friction if what you use already works. This probably doesn't apply to gamers since you have to upgrade anyway if you want the lastest and greatest, but everybody else seems pretty happy to continue using XP; I see it everyday in ATMs, in medical equipment, in cash registers, in libraries, etc etc.

I honestly have no idea what's going to take for XP usage to drop substantially. I can only wonder whether this will lead to an IE6-like problem in the future.

It's not my primary gaming machine OS, but I have an older laptop with XP on it that also happens to have Steam installed. For what I use it for, I have no reason to upgrade the OS.

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