GOL Survey Results: April

The results for the April survey are now available for you to take a look at and compare with results from previous months.

You can find the new survey for May here, so please fill that out if you haven’t already.

Our graph maker Fedso is working on locking colours to answers and has done so with a few already. Also looking at making better colour choices (ie. green for Nvidia, red for AMD, etc.) There may be something which tries to estimate a total trend in game sales coming soon, but we’re still trying to work out how we’ll do that - hopefully will be ready by next month.

There have been no major changes or trends this month other than with the number of respondents and the usual unique questions, so analysis will be limited to those this month.

Please click on the images to enlarge. Once enlarged, you can also cycle through them using the arrows.

Respondents


Many thanks to the 2362 people who took the time to complete the survey! That’s over twice as much as last time (1026) and way over the 1000 mark which I wanted to stay above. A lot of this seems to be because of Reddit, but could also be increasing traffic figures on GOL as well, hopefully Liam can comment on that.

We also already have over 1300 responses already for the May survey, so it seems like keeping it above 1000 is no longer a worry. I’m pretty happy with the response this survey has gotten and hopefully we’ll continue to improve things and provide more information as time goes on.

One thing that is beginning to concern me now is duplicate responses. We have no way of knowing how many are duplicates or if this is even a serious problem at all. There currently is no limit to how many times people can fill the survey out and we’re relying on trust in the community to try not to mess with the results.

Hopefully at some point we can get this integrated into GOL and have a requirement that only registered users can fill in the survey, but that may be a long time away so for now we’ll just have to say to people that filling the survey in multiple times to see your favourite Desktop Environment climb a few percentage points is really shooting all of us in the foot.

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?


One minor observation here is that Unity has taken over KDE (Plasma) for the first time. I kind of expected this to go the other way around since I found Plasma 5 to be pretty awesome and was thinking of switching to it from XFCE for my main PC. This might be because it's a little buggy around the moment. Would be nice to hear some thoughts on this from KDE users!

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?


It might be worth reminding that Steam's statistics across all platforms are 52% for Nvidia, 19% for Intel and 28% for AMD. This disparity is probably a combination of the state of AMD video drivers on Linux and the fact that GOL most likely has a lower percentage of "casual" gamers than Steam as a whole, hence the higher Intel figures.

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


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?


Unique Question 1 - Unique Question 1: Of the Linux games announced at GDC, which are you going to get?


It seems like a distant memory, but this survey came out in the context of GDC so I decided to include all the big announcements in here to get an idea of what’s most popular. I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that the Total War games were the least popular, considering that strategy is a fairly niche genre, but I did expect Evolve to do a bit better. I didn’t expect The Witcher III to come out on top considering all the complaints about the port, but otherwise these results should be fairly in line with what people expected.

I think Shadow of Mordor is the one I’m most looking forward too (if anyone cares what I think), but I’d be interested in giving pretty much all of those a try, depending on financial situations. I’d probably put GRID at number 2, simply because we don’t have any AAA racing games on Linux right now and it’s been a long time since I’ve played one. If anyone wants to give their thoughts on the choices they made, it would make for interesting reading in the comments section :).

Unique Question 2 - Unique Question 2: Will you be getting a Steam Machine any time after release?


This is the third time I have asked this question, once in September, once before GDC and again after GDC to see if any of that made a difference to people. You can compare the results here:

September:

Yes - 11.49%
No - 29.25%
Still undecided - 30.60%
I already built my own (or planning to build my own) - 28.66%

Pre-GDC:

Yes - 10.4%
No - 31.7%
Still undecided- 32.1%
Already built my own- 9.2%
Planning to build my own - 16.8%

Post-GDC:

Yes - 7.8%
No - 41.1%
Still undecided - 26.2%
Already built my own - 10.1%
Planning to build my own - 14.8%

It seemed that while there wasn’t much change between september and just before the GDC, all that changed after the conference. It seems that interest in the systems has dropped pretty significantly.

Again, numbers are numbers and tend to be quite dehumanising, so it would be very interesting to hear what the reasons were behind this in the comments. Perhaps the silly prices of the machines influenced people, or maybe their far cheaper streaming device seems like a more tantalizing option for those with high-end PCs.

Personally, for me it’s the prices. For the kind of money they’re charging, you can build a far better gaming machine in a pretty small case and get the controller, essentially giving you something much better than what they’re offering. At some point I might do an article on the sort of machine you could build for that kind of money and do a side-by-side theoretical comparison with the numerous Steam Machine offerings.

In either case, I don’t think this is very indicative of the success that Steam Machines may or may not have, but more an indication that it’s alienated the PC market a bit. However, since the intention of Steam Machines is to bring console gamers into the PC market, then what we think doesn’t really matter to Valve, it’s only really interesting to us. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.