Steam Survey for February 2026 shows a big swing to Simplified Chinese

The Steam Hardware & Software Survey for February 2026 is live and it's looking a bit odd, with a huge swing towards Simplified Chinese.

As usual when this happens, the Linux share drops as well and one of the biggest drops we've seen in a single month. It's entirely likely that Valve will do some sort of correction here as they've done before. But for now the data shows:

• Windows 96.61% +1.99%
• Linux 2.23% -1.15%
• macOS 1.16% -0.85%

For languages English is now at 22.27% (-14.74%) with Simplified Chinese at 54.60% (+30.74%). For a single month, something about this doesn't seem quite right. Especially with Windows 10 64 bit seeing +12.46%.

The usual snapshot from our dedicated Steam Tracker page:

For just Linux, the popular distributions listed are:

• SteamOS Holo 64 bit 23.83% +23.83%
• Arch Linux 64 bit 9.07% +9.07%
• CachyOS 64 bit 8.59% +8.59%
• Linux Mint 22.3 64 bit 6.62% +4.29%
• Bazzite 64 bit 5.79% +5.79%
• Freedesktop SDK 25.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 5.26% -1.08%
• Ubuntu Core 24 64 bit 3.82% -0.10%
• Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit 2.83% -0.94%
• Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit 2.59% -3.98%
• Other 31.58% +16.20%

I'll be keeping an eye on it to see if Valve tweak anything.

Source: Valve