Here is the Steam Hardware survey for January 2015, starting the year with not many changes as expected.
Linux results for January 2015
Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64 bit 0.39% -0.01%
Ubuntu 14.10 64 bit 0.14% +0.01%
Linux 3.10 64 bit 0.10% +0.01%
Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca 64 bit 0.08% +0.02%
Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 0.06% 0.00%
Linux Mint 17 Qiana 64 bit 0.06%-0.02%
Total: 1.09% - 0.01%
Last Month: 1.10%
My thoughts on it
Again without any meaningful change, the only thing that this month's stats showed us is how inaccurate those numbers can be.... as we always mention, they could be truncating the percentages, rounding up or rounding down.... whatever they are doing, those number are very off this month.... I think it would be very good if Valve could show us raw numbers instead of percentages, but that is all we have for now.
As always, remember this is a survey, so it won't ask every single one of you to do it. It would only be truly accurate if it did it behind the scenes, but that's not what a survey is for this is just to get a general idea.
Final Note: Look at it this way, Steam has around 100 million active users, 1% of 100 million is about 1,000,000 (1 million) people. What developer wouldn't want to hook into a market that big? Of course it doesn't mean they are guaranteed that amount of sales, but it's something fun to remember.
See the survey on Steam here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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is there any link on steam that you can do that survey?
The additional api thing is only a problem if the game in question runs on an engine with poor portability design. A hefty percentage of new and upcoming games from the bigger studios are built on modern engines with existing OpenGL backends, but that of course does not mean they get released on minor platforms like Linux.
That's true. The platform must become more profitable, and I believe it will.
Anyway, I had the luck to particpate in the steam survey under linux this month (it is the second time for me).
WINE can be detected, AFAIK.
Sure. Worms Armageddon can detect Wine then prompt the user to use optimized settings for Wine.
http://worms2d.info/Installing_WA_on_Linux
Will Valve add this to their Steam for Windows client? I don't think so.
Wait, how does this follow?
Of course it can. It's part of the computer specs that get submitted to Valve, specifically the Wine version number. It's also the reason why opening steam under Wine at the beginning of the month just about guarantees a survey (seriously, try it). Valve is deliberately targeting under-represented systems because they know what they are doing, they need a representative sample. Everyone who opens Steam on Wine and gets the survey closes it because they think it will be counted as Windows. The people refusing the survey are trying to game the survey by not completing it, but statistics 101 is knowing how your polling technique is biased. Valve would have OS stats from connections and they fire off a survey request to those they need more numbers for. (Seriously, do you really think Valve doesn't know the OS version + Steam version of every connection? Of course they do.) The survey isn't asking what OS you are running, it's asking for specific version detail, it's asking for hardware details. They already know the answer to the Linux percentage.
Seriously people, stop questioning the numbers every god damn month. Yes there is always error, but Valve hires extremely smart people who know how to run a survey.