GOL Survey Results: January

Thanks to GOL reader Fedso, we now have month-by-month comparisons for the survey as well as an automated program which takes the raw survey data and makes graphs. This is pretty exciting stuff since now one of the main goals of the survey project has been achieved and we can observe trends over time.

You can find the new survey for this month here.

If you have any questions on the technical aspects of this or about the code, I’m sure Fedso can answer your questions on here. If that can be put up on GitHub or somewhere similar, I might also upload the CSV files so people can create their own visualisations and contribute to the project generally.

One thing to note before going on to the results is that the first set of results on the graph (from October) used different wording for some of the questions and answers, so bare in mind that there are one or two questions with very different results for the first month. Otherwise, the questions have not changed at all in the past three months, so the monthly comparisons can be considered accurate in that sense.

UPDATE: The images have been thumbnailed to make for easier reading. If you want to see the full-size graph, click on the images to enlarge.

Question 1 - Do you currently use Linux as your primary PC gaming platform?



Question 2 - Did you use Wine to play games last month?



Question 3 - Did you use a Windows partition for gaming last month?



Question 4 - What distribution do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?



Question 5 - What Desktop Environment do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?



Question 6 - Did you change your primary Linux gaming distribution last month?



Question 7 - What graphics card do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?



Question 8 - Which drivers do you use for that graphics card?



For the graphics driver question we can now see a breakdown of drivers per graphics card manufacturer. It’s quite interesting to see that almost nobody is using the Nouveau drivers, while there are an equal number of people using Radeon and fglrx on AMD cards. Thanks to Fedso for breaking down the results like this, it’s very interesting to see and it never occurred to me to do it. Also, kudos to the 7% of Intel users on proprietary drivers :P.

AMD

Intel

Nvidia


Question 9 - What CPU do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?



Question 10 - Did you exclusively buy Linux-supported games last month?



Question 11 - How many Linux games did you buy last month?



Question 12 - Which of these retailers did you use to buy your Linux games last month?



Seeing an increase in sales through Steam these past couple of months when the Winter Sale was on is to be expected. It’s also quite interesting to see the nosedive in sales through Humble Bundle and Humble store, probably due to the fact that there’s less and less bundles with a good number of Linux games on them. It will be interesting to see if there’s a spike in sales there if they release a bundle with some new Linux ports.

Unique Question - How optimistic are you for Linux gaming in 2015?



- Extremely, SteamOS will be a huge success and soon everyone will be releasing Linux games and eventually Windows users will resort to opening "+1 for Windows" threads on Steam. (78) 9%
- Very, there will be a steady increase of games and more and more people will switch to Linux (351) 42%
- More or less, Linux will continue to have a good selection of games but will remain a minority OS (359) 43%
- Not very, there will be less and less developers releasing games on Linux when they look at their sales figures (17) 2%
- We're all doomed. 11 1%

The unique question last month was a bit of fun and seemed apt following the new year. Being a bit of a pessimist by nature, I would put myself somewhere between the “more or less” and “not very” camps, but since we have seen a couple of big titles released with day 1 Linux support already this year, I’m starting to feel a bit more optimistic. The big elephant in the room this year will be SteamOS and Steam Machines, and I’m sure many people like myself were also itching to answer with the first response since so much depends on the success of Valve’s ambitious venture. 2015 will certainly be the most interesting year for Linux gaming so far, for better or for worse.

The unique questions are also the last remaining part of the survey which still uses the old graphs, but hopefully this will be updated next month.

Respondents



Thanks to the 828 people who took the time to complete the survey! Also, please remember to share this and remember to do it every month if you have the time. I would really like to get this number to 1000 and keep it there since it seems like a good sample size to have.

Again, you can find the new survey for this month here. Please fill it out :). Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.