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Steam Hardware Survey For February 2015

By -
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.
Tags: Editorial
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About the author -
Gaming on Linux since '12.
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28 comments
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fraghopper Mar 9, 2015
I don't know if I ever got any kind of survey, either at install or otherwise. I thought by 'survey' the article meant that Steam surveys the hardware bing used to download games, in the background.
vulture Mar 9, 2015
Quoting: fraghopperI don't know if I ever got any kind of survey, either at install or otherwise. I thought by 'survey' the article meant that Steam surveys the hardware bing used to download games, in the background.

nope, you get presented by questionaire you can opt in or out

i got it on wine few times, never on Linux. even though wine accounts as less than 10% of my gaming.

it even went as far as me seeing survey, pressing cancel and starting linux client with no survey... ahh, well close and start wine >>>>> survey again, repeat that once more with the same result

i still think survey on linux is some sort of spooky tale
sarmad Mar 9, 2015
Linux usage won't go up before the arrival of Steam Machines. In fact, it's quite surprising there is a million active Linux gamers given that it often takes some technical knowledge to get everything working properly.
neffo Mar 9, 2015
Is anyone else getting that weird bug where Steam doesn't restart after an update?
fabertawe Mar 9, 2015
Quoting: neffoIs anyone else getting that weird bug where Steam doesn't restart after an update?

Yep, I got used to just running it a second time.

I think I've had the survey twice under Linux and I've run it most days since we've had the client. When I was playing games through Wine I had it regularly... and I wasn't even using Wine very often!
janpan Mar 9, 2015
I am running arch Linux and I always wonder, what about all the other distros ? It seems like they only have ubuntu and mint, but what about the endless amount of other distros ? There used to be an other category as well. I'm sure that can make up a percentage at least for some games.
Pecisk Mar 11, 2015
Yes, I think for Linux gaming to be any success we must press on numbers and also just being good supportive community. Let's work on our strengths and let's not fret on things which haven't yet to pass.
keiki Mar 17, 2015
Steam has 125 Million customers as of February. I guess that's the reason why the % number dropped a little again.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9003/valve-to-showcase-steamvr-hardware-steam-machines-more-at-gdc-2015/
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