We have reported in the past that Valve's hardware survey numbers for its Steam PC game download service shows that Windows 8 has slowly gained more and more users. The latest numbers for January 2013 showed that 8.76 percent of Steam customers used Microsoft's latest OS.
Yet another PC game download service that's gaining more and more customers is GoG.com. The service launched several years ago and at first offered classic PC games but the site has since branched out to offer more recent PC games, including a number of indie titles. GoG.com currently has over 500 games in its library for Windows and Mac.
Neowin contacted GoG.com to find out how many of its customers currently use Windows 8. Oleg Klapovsky, the business development director for the service, told us via email:
Roughly 10 percent of our users are on Windows 8 right now. In December we had about 6 percent of our user base on Windows 8, and--of course--a few months before that we had 0 Windows 8 users.
However, in an interesting twist, Klapovsky also told us that the total number of Windows 8 users on GoG.com is still behind that of its Mac audience. This runs counter to Steam's numbers which show that its Windows 8 user base is already well ahead of its Mac users. Klapovsky would not reveal just how many Mac users GoG.com has, nor the percentage of its users for the other older Windows operating systems from Microsoft.
Some have remarked that the user growth rate for Windows 8 at this stage has been slower than previous Windows launches and have therefore expressed concerns that this could cause issues for the PC industry going forward. Klapovsky told us:
I don't think the growth of Windows 8 speaks to any weakness in the industry; I think it speaks to the fact that Windows 7 is a very well-adopted OS and one that people don't feel the need to step away from. PC gaming--and the PC platform as a whole--is a very robust environment, and remains the dominant personal computing OS. From GOG.com's point of view, the fact that we've diversified our offering to cover all of the commonly-used Windows OSes as well as Mac OSX means that we're well-positioned to continue to thrive regardless of what the future of PC gaming may bring.
Klapovsky also told Neowin that GoG.com does not have any plans to make a specific Windows 8 "Modern" app for its service.
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