Gabe Newell, the co-founder of the video game company Valve Corporation, whose digital distribution service Steam is currently the most popular platform for PC games, has been criticizing Windows 8 since it's existence. He called Windows 8 a 'catastrophe' last year, and added that Windows users would probably "rage quit" computing after using Windows 8.
Today, in an interview with The Verge at CES 2013, Newell repeated the same stance and called Windows 8 "this giant sadness", and drew attention towards the slow adoption rate of the Microsoft's new OS.
"The thing about Windows 8 wasn't just [Microsoft's] distribution. As somebody who participates in the overall PC ecosystem, it’s totally great when faster wireless networks and standards come out, or when graphics get faster. 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." There’s supposed to be a 40 percent uptake, not a 20 percent decline, so that’s what really scares me. When I started using it I was like "oh my god..." I find [Windows 8] unusable," Newell stated.
Data collected by Steam's Hardware survey affirm that only 7% of total Steam users are using Windows 8 currently.
Source: The Verge