Steam Hardware Survey For September 2014, Linux Rises

We can safely assume those 0.1 % "raise" is close to the uncertainty bounds.
It makes no sense to interpret it as a trend.

+1
The numbers have been going down a bit, the numbers now have gone up a bit, ...

I also got a survey for the first time 3 days ago.. was quite surprised.

As someone else pointed out, since the overall user count continues to rise, perhaps the percentages going up or down from month to month really are not the best gauge of how Linux is doing. Maybe instead of saying Linux rises or Linux falls, we should look at the actual estimated user count every month, and base the fall / rise on the percentage of that. It seems plausible to me, without doing any math, that we may have been rising all along.

Maybe instead of saying Linux rises or Linux falls, we should look at the actual estimated user count every month, and base the fall / rise on the percentage of that.

Sounds good, but AFAIR, they don't publish the total number of users monthly.

havent gotten a survey in a long time on linux. Signed on to my mac for the first time in months and I got the survey.

Maybe instead of saying Linux rises or Linux falls, we should look at the actual estimated user count every month, and base the fall / rise on the percentage of that.

Sounds good, but AFAIR, they don't publish the total number of users monthly.

Also there is probably a difference between the total number of users and the total number of active users (I think you need to be an active user to have the survey).

The thing that will take Linux to the top of these charts is if Valve markets the Steam Machine as a console. It has to be more than just a free OS; it needs to be something that you buy for serious console gaming. They should not write drivers for the valve controller for any platform but Linux, they should release some exclusive titles. I'm not even saying that for Linux's sake, I'm just saying that for Valve's sake; their Steam Machine will die if they just add it to the market without any exclusive features.

The thing that will take Linux to the top of these charts is if Valve markets the Steam Machine as a console. It has to be more than just a free OS; it needs to be something that you buy for serious console gaming. They should not write drivers for the valve controller for any platform but Linux, they should release some exclusive titles. I'm not even saying that for Linux's sake, I'm just saying that for Valve's sake; their Steam Machine will die if they just add it to the market without any exclusive features.

I've been thinking. Gabe said HL3 will NOT be SteamOS-exclusive. But he never said that it will be released for all platforms on day one. I think releasing HL3 for SteamOS a month or two before Windows and Mac, could really kick-start the Steam Machines.

Linux users are also potentially more privacy conscious than the general population so they might refuse to send data to Valve. In my humble opinion anyway ..

Not sure I agree there. I feel like Linux users who would care more about sending anonymous info for the survey than growing the number of visible Linux users probably aren't using Steam in the first place.

edit: Also, in the past 2 years I've been using Linux (and Steam), I've only seen the survey once.

I've been thinking. Gabe said HL3 will NOT be SteamOS-exclusive. But he never said that it will be released for all platforms on day one. I think releasing HL3 for SteamOS a month or two before Windows and Mac, could really kick-start the Steam Machines.

Part of me wants to see something like this happen due to xbox and PS exclusives over the years and the fact that us penguins are still largely treated as second class citizens. But.. the other part of me has always felt exclusives were dumb, it only hurts the games sales. Plus, I can't see it affecting hardware sales THAT much, though I wouldn't mind sifting through data or reading a GOOD article on the subject.

Neither myself nor anyone else I know personally (that I know of) has ever bought any console/pc just to play a specific game. Now if a developer only wants to develop for a single platform then that is their decision. It seems more often then not though it's not the developers making the decisions.. it's MS, Sony or Nintendo inking back room deals with publishers, where the publishers tend to be paid hefty chucks of casholla to agree to making a title exclusive. How much of that tends to end up in a developers pocket I have no idea. I'm guessing not enough.

From a purely business standpoint though, I think it could go one of two ways if they were to release HL3 or some other HUGELY popular game on SteamOS/Linux first when steam machines arrive. On one hand it could greatly help the sales of steam machines because lets face it... many people can't even handle reinstalling windows from an OEM supplied recovery partition much less install even the simplest of linux distros to install in order to play it on their own computer.

I think for this to work though they need to forget about giving (by default) people a desktop to play with as well. It needs to be locked to steamOS "big picture mode" (BPM) and have the functionality of say local media, netflix, youtube, facebook etc built into BPM more along the lines of how the current consoles offer those services. Personally, I would like to see them really integrate XBMC/Kodi into steam OS to serve those functions. Many a noob has borked their linux install unintentionally and without real knowledge of how to fix it... hell i've been there done that. That would be horrible press when enough people have it happen to them. If an advanced user wants a full fledged desktop.. they will know how to add it, it's basically debian after all. It needs to be put behind a warning/eula that tampering with steamOS, while not forbidden is "dangerous and not suggested" and it is completely on the user if they screw something up. I obviously don't want a locked down platform like current consoles.. but again.. lets face it. Some people are just dumb and even going by a "step by step" how-to will still manage to even copy/paste wrong and screw something up.

EDIT* basically the average steam machine owner doesn't even need to be aware that their console is running linux, just like most PS3/4 owners don't know theirs is running modified FreeBSD and most Xbox One owners don't know it's running a modified windows OS. *END EDIT*

On the other hand.. the world might not quite be ready for steamOS/linux and exclusive or not.. will just wait for it to come to windows or xbox/ps and the initial sales #'s of the game for those first months would not be very good (which is NOT good) and steam machines tank.

I think tt will be interesting to see how Valve plays this.. their prototypes and the steamOS beta is obviously pretty open, I wonder just how blatantly open the consumer models are/will be.

OH! and just to be on topic.. I have NEVER seen the survey for steam on linux. I tend to jump back and forth between desktop environments multiple times a day, so steam is restarted multiple times a day and I still have not had it pop up. I've seen it many times on windows.

This rise is probably due to the CSGO port, many people stop using dual-boot due to that.
The next month will be interesting too

Actually, I ceased dual-booting after X-COM came out. I don't miss many of the Windows games I used to play when I did dual-boot,and I expect several of them to suddenly appear in my Steam library, just like Borderlands 2.

Linux users are also potentially more privacy conscious than the general population so they might refuse to send data to Valve. In my humble opinion anyway ..

I would like to take the survey to raise the linux share, but it just never appears. I have many hundred hours of steam gameplay under my belt, but the survey never showed up. I saw the survey two times when I was running something via wine, but I cancelled it so that I don't count towards windows. I think something is broken and survey doesn't show to linux users. Maybe the real share is a bit higher.

Not sure I agree there. I feel like Linux users who would care more about sending anonymous info for the survey than growing the number of visible Linux users probably aren't using Steam in the first place.

Agreed. Also, the fact that people care about the representation of Linux in these numbers is probably highly indicative of the general mood towards them.

Yes they might not want Valve to know about them, or their computer, but they perceive the survey is important to the future of Linux gaming. In the case of a Windows user, despite potentially placing less value in personal privacy (although, I think this is a pretty wild assumption to make to start with) the actual cost (loss of some privacy) is the same as a Linux user. The bigger difference between the two groups is what you might call the propensity for altruism. A Linux user is more likely to complete the survey because it benefits the greater good (or at least the greater good of the Linux user). A Windows user does not have worries about the representation of their chosen OS. It's unlikely that someone running Windows 8.0 will see a drop in representation of their current OS and feel any level of concern. That this thread exists says that Linux users do.

There is also, obviously, a degree of selfishness in that consistently low representation of Linux in Steam surveys could result in less game availability in the future. Linux users want games after all.

It's likely that this concern about representation translates to increased response rates for Linux users over Windows users. (I have no idea if Mac users care about Steam surveys or not.) A higher response rate would mean that Steam doesn't need to ask as many users on Linux, and hence you see them less often than you might on Windows (where response rates are in theory much lower). It's quite easy for Steam to target differing OS users based on how their client identifies itself to the service. The differing response rates would require demographic correction on some level, so even a large number of users refusing the survey on an OS wouldn't be a problem. Steam would just keep asking people on that OS until they reached a representative sample. (It's possible that the response rate on Windows is an order of magnitude less.) Without any investment in the survey (chance of a prize, etc), most people would not waste their time responding. For example, if a website you frequent pops up a satisfaction survey most people would simply ignore it. The cost/benefit (including the altruistic benefits) ratio is way too low for most people to bother.

It's also very likely that Steam is asking less Linux users as they have gotten repeat data month to month. In the first month that Steam launched on Linux it's quite likely they asked a much higher percentage of users as they would have zero data from the month previous. You would need a much higher number of respondents to have confidence in the stats you were collecting.

I just crunched the stats going back to January, it's interesting. I might make a news post about it a bit later once I have cleaned up the data a bit.

The summary is that there is a (small) aggregate trend upwards in Linux users (slope = 15,000, R2 = 0.452). There's a lot of noise.

The number of active users is in the band of 1M to 1.1M, there seems to be correlation between big game releases and usage. The release of Witcher 2, XCom and CS:GO and Borderlands 2 all correlate with a ~100,000 (temporary) increase in users. This probably suggests that a significant percentage of Linux users dual boot to Windows to play games. (It seems unlikely that these are largely people just trying it out, uninstalling and going back to Windows.)

Here is an idea I have come up with that might be useful to others.

I used to buy extra gift copies to support Linux devs. Then I sometimes gave or traded them to my friends. Some of those friends still partly or fully used Windows. Then Aspyr revealed how things really worked.

My solution; a second Linux account. Whenever I buy a second copy to add to the Linux stats, or more importantly, make sure companies like Feral Interactive and Aspyr get their cut, I gift that to my other account. Then I make sure to launch it there at least once.

If any of my friends need a copy to play multiplayer I will now let them borrow it from my second (guest) account via family sharing, instead of gifting them a copy that would turn into a Windows purchase.

Consider this idea when you think of raising Linux stats. Oh and I recently had the survey, not too long since the second one. My second account then got it almost immediately after having added games to it.

I just crunched the stats going back to January, it's interesting. I might make a news post about it a bit later once I have cleaned up the data a bit.

Please do! That sounds really interesting.

The results for our own survey will be out soon too!