Here's the Steam Hardware survey results for February 2015 with one interesting difference from the past surveys.
Oh, and you might have noticed that this article has been arriving a little later than it used to.... that would be because I decided that it was better to wait like a week or so to avoid getting numbers that Valve could change in the first few days.
To the numbers now:
Linux results for February 2015
Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64 bit 0.30% -0.09%
Ubuntu 14.10 64 bit 0.14% 0.00%
Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca 64 bit 0.09% +0.01%
Linux 3.10 64 bit 0.08% -0.02%
Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS 64 bit 0.07% +0.07%
Total: 1.02% -0.07%
Last Month: 1.09%
My thoughts on it
Well, first, Linux had quite a drop this month, and I don’t know if that has any relation with the second point; but did you notice the lower amount of distributions? For the first time I believe, only 64 bits distributions appeared in the survey! Valve probably didn’t decide to just ignore the 32 bits ones, so those distros probably just didn’t make it into the 0.01% cut....
I wonder if the games announced this week, will make those numbers start to get a little higher, though I don’t expect much to change at least before the dawn of the Steam Machines, which we will have to wait until November to see, unfortunately.
Important things to remember
Be aware these results will probably not be that accurate as we don't know how they do their percentage results, they could be rounding up, rounding down or truncating the percentages. So a 0.5% could actually be nearly 0.6% as it could be 0.59% but they could do no rounding and simply truncate it.
Also remember it 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.
Oh, and you might have noticed that this article has been arriving a little later than it used to.... that would be because I decided that it was better to wait like a week or so to avoid getting numbers that Valve could change in the first few days.
To the numbers now:
Linux results for February 2015
Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS 64 bit 0.30% -0.09%
Ubuntu 14.10 64 bit 0.14% 0.00%
Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca 64 bit 0.09% +0.01%
Linux 3.10 64 bit 0.08% -0.02%
Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS 64 bit 0.07% +0.07%
Total: 1.02% -0.07%
Last Month: 1.09%
My thoughts on it
Well, first, Linux had quite a drop this month, and I don’t know if that has any relation with the second point; but did you notice the lower amount of distributions? For the first time I believe, only 64 bits distributions appeared in the survey! Valve probably didn’t decide to just ignore the 32 bits ones, so those distros probably just didn’t make it into the 0.01% cut....
I wonder if the games announced this week, will make those numbers start to get a little higher, though I don’t expect much to change at least before the dawn of the Steam Machines, which we will have to wait until November to see, unfortunately.
Important things to remember
Be aware these results will probably not be that accurate as we don't know how they do their percentage results, they could be rounding up, rounding down or truncating the percentages. So a 0.5% could actually be nearly 0.6% as it could be 0.59% but they could do no rounding and simply truncate it.
Also remember it 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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On a sidenote: I also hope that Microsoft will drop DX after its 12th iteration completely and start embracing Vulkan. I mean they could benefit as well, without losing too much.
I have such high hopes for Vulkan and maybe, we'll eventually see OpenGL rise back to its former glory.
Is this true for everyone else?
I wonder why SteamOS still uses 3.10 and why it manages to enter the charts contrary to all non-debian distros.
Maybe Windows users are reinstalling the OS more frequently?
I know that at least among my friends/relatives/coworkers the method of reinstall Windows is the solution of choice when something is going wrong/sluggish etc.
Just a thought.
I wouldn't put it past them to actually see the benefits.
I guess their whole "vendor-lock in" won't be working many more years. They have to become more open and go more in the direction of a service provider than a software manufacturer. But that's just my thoughts.
I had to reinstall a copy of Windows for a university course where the game I program has to be able to run on Windows (although it uses OpenGL).
I also installed Steam, to be able to chat with some friends while programming. And guess what, that's one week and I got the survey twice, while under Linux I got it once in all those many months -.-
I do hope tho that the survey somehow incorporates the steam-id... not in a problematic way (think privacy) but so that it's cleaned.
But with a lot of decisions that Satya took since joining them, that is not so unthinkable anymore.
We also have to take in account that DX12 and Vulkan work much more similar than other DX-Versions and OpenGL do, so porting won't be that huge anymore. If we don't have a huge downside on Vulkan, we may very well see a decline of DX in favour of Vulkan. That will very much be up to Microsoft and the driver developers (who basically crippled OpenGL in Windows), and very well will depend on the pressure of the industry.
I would be interested for Valve to trigger a full, user-wide survey as a one-off to get figures across their whole market.
Within that said, it's clear that they are more interested in the major gaming party, even if linux is getting some tention and news lately, it's still a considerable small market to be not business critical for developers, maximum a "nice to know".
Correct me if you find evidence to the contrary though.
And I agree - figuring out Linux vs Windows vs Mac users would be VERY easy - just check the Steam client 'agent' connecting to their servers.
i think this is too soon. at least until it is published and knows how things with galium nine will work out.