Here are last months Steam hardware stats for anyone that cares. Windows 8 will soon be the second most used OS by Steam gamers. 

 http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

This must make Gabe Newell very sad...considering he just stated that Windows 8 is like a "giant sadness" to him.

" Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business. Rather than everybody being all excited to go buy a new PC, buying new software to run on it, we’ve had a 20+ percent decline in PC sales — it’s like "holy cow that’s not what the new generation of the operating system is supposed to do."

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/8/3852144/gabe-newell-interview-steam-box-future-of-gaming

I think very highly of Gabe but he is seriously smoking some harsh drugs when he states a 20% decline. More like 2% decline... 

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23660312#.UOyqponjlWQ

Anywho, just thought I'd share this. We can go back to "Windows 8 doesn't sell" talk.

I can't see the image

Go here, and select OS Version - http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

A bit of rounding up there. Says 6.3% on mine. Or is that a combo of 32 & 64-bit?

c-c-c-c-ombo! (breaker)

On your comment about Gabe, PC hardware is in a major decline and has been for the past few years. Tablets are seemingly the future and it's something Windows 8 and Microsoft seem to have embraced.

He's basically saying that Windows 8 isn't helping improve the PC business, which it isn't.

This table is adding different "versions" of the same OS. For example, if Vista has 7% and Vista 64 bits has 2% I put Windows Vista like 9%

That's only for Windows OS. The rest accounts for Ubuntu + Mac, etc. 

Although Windows 8 is low, it grew more than 2% in the last month. So it could get bigger.

Well that's not much of an achievement since its competitors for the position are buggy and widely despised, and 12 years old, respectively.

It'll probably rise higher than Vista did, but nowhere near the heights that 7 reached. And then they'll release another OS in a couple of years with significant improvements that do something other than ruin the UI (making the user fix it himself), and everything will be fine again. It's a nice cycle.

Steam runs fine on my Windows 8 notebook so I don't really see why Gaben was complaining. It's not like you have to use their appstore.

He comes of as a rambler at times so who knows what he meant... But even if that is what he meant, he is wrong. Looking at worldwide data, last year the desktop market was down 1.4%. IDC are estimating that it will be down 1.2% this year...rest of the years are pure speculation and I won't consider them as accurate.

I know that in USA and other first world countries desktop sales are down, but emerging markets are up to offset the difference. Besides, what is microsoft supposed to do to offset a dying form factor? His expectations of Windows is too high if he thinks they do much to breathe new life in to desktops.

PC Shipment Volume Growth by Region and Form Factor, 2011-2016 

Well, I mean, of course it's going to be the second most used OS eventually. What does it have as competition? XP and Vista? Not much there to brag about, to be honest. It's not like people are running out and buying PCs because of Windows 8, it just happens to be what comes installed.

What's more impressive is how many people are holding on to XP.