It’s time to get your monthly fix of stats now that the results for the August survey are available for you to take a look at and compare with results from previous months. This also marks the one-year anniversary of the GOL survey!
You can find the new survey for September here, so please fill that out if you haven’t already.
There’s been steady improvements in the quality of the questions and taking on board feedback, which many of you have noticed. The main one for this month is the addition of a graph showing the average amount of games bought, rather than the individual responses, so thanks to Fedso for that!
Please click on the images to enlarge. Once enlarged, you can also cycle through them using the arrows.
Respondents
We had 1250 responses this month, just slightly below the 1496 last month, but still well within what we’re looking for, so thanks for everyone who took the time to fill it out.
As usual, we ask nicely that anyone on r/linux_gaming reading this please share the survey there if it hasn’t been shared already. This is more to ensure that the fluctuations which have messed up the results a bit in months past don’t return.
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?
KDE is back on top again and Gnome is back in third, with Unity second. It seems the normal order of things has been restored. Also, before I get a scolding, the i3 option was removed long ago, but this survey was written way back in July, so this will be the last time it is seen on GOL ;).
Question 6 - Did you change your primary Linux gaming distribution last month?
Question 7 - What type of device do you primarily use for Linux gaming?
I expected to see perhaps a few more laptops in this section, but it’s certainly no surprise that there are overwhelmingly desktop users. We’ll be keeping an eye on the Sofa-PC stats over the coming months.
Question 8 - What graphics card do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
Here’s the first results with the “Integrated AMD” option added, so it seems we will get more accurate results from now on.
Question 9 - Which drivers do you use for that graphics card?
AMD
Intel
Nvidia
Question 10 - What CPU do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
Question 11 - Did you exclusively buy Linux-supported games last month?
Question 12 - How many Linux games did you buy last month?
Last month I did a bit of analysis suggesting that Linux sales were in decline, and this new graph seems to support that. The exact number isn’t necessarily as important as the trend, since it's more prone to over-estimations and under-estimations to the respondents, who we’re asking to recall their purchases over the last 30 days. The little spikes around the time of the Steam summer and winter sales seems to indicate we’re getting pretty good data though.
However, as I said in the previous results, this isn’t necessarily negative and is most likely due to changes in purchasing habits (such as less bundles and more expensive games) and other reasons.
Question 13- Which of these retailers did you use to buy your Linux games last month?
Unique Question 1 - Do you currently use emulators for gaming?
This is one of those where if we had asked this question a couple of years ago, there would have been a lot more people using emulators considering there was a more limited choice of gaming options. We’re pretty fortunate to have a good selection on Linux, many of which are very actively developed.
Unique Question 2 - How's your interest in Shadow of Mordor?
It’s pretty safe to say that Shadow of Mordor is a very popular game. As far as I recall, this has been the most popular game featured in the unique questions on the survey. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
You can find the new survey for September here, so please fill that out if you haven’t already.
There’s been steady improvements in the quality of the questions and taking on board feedback, which many of you have noticed. The main one for this month is the addition of a graph showing the average amount of games bought, rather than the individual responses, so thanks to Fedso for that!
Please click on the images to enlarge. Once enlarged, you can also cycle through them using the arrows.
Respondents
We had 1250 responses this month, just slightly below the 1496 last month, but still well within what we’re looking for, so thanks for everyone who took the time to fill it out.
As usual, we ask nicely that anyone on r/linux_gaming reading this please share the survey there if it hasn’t been shared already. This is more to ensure that the fluctuations which have messed up the results a bit in months past don’t return.
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?
KDE is back on top again and Gnome is back in third, with Unity second. It seems the normal order of things has been restored. Also, before I get a scolding, the i3 option was removed long ago, but this survey was written way back in July, so this will be the last time it is seen on GOL ;).
Question 6 - Did you change your primary Linux gaming distribution last month?
Question 7 - What type of device do you primarily use for Linux gaming?
I expected to see perhaps a few more laptops in this section, but it’s certainly no surprise that there are overwhelmingly desktop users. We’ll be keeping an eye on the Sofa-PC stats over the coming months.
Question 8 - What graphics card do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
Here’s the first results with the “Integrated AMD” option added, so it seems we will get more accurate results from now on.
Question 9 - Which drivers do you use for that graphics card?
AMD
Intel
Nvidia
Question 10 - What CPU do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
Question 11 - Did you exclusively buy Linux-supported games last month?
Question 12 - How many Linux games did you buy last month?
Last month I did a bit of analysis suggesting that Linux sales were in decline, and this new graph seems to support that. The exact number isn’t necessarily as important as the trend, since it's more prone to over-estimations and under-estimations to the respondents, who we’re asking to recall their purchases over the last 30 days. The little spikes around the time of the Steam summer and winter sales seems to indicate we’re getting pretty good data though.
However, as I said in the previous results, this isn’t necessarily negative and is most likely due to changes in purchasing habits (such as less bundles and more expensive games) and other reasons.
Question 13- Which of these retailers did you use to buy your Linux games last month?
Unique Question 1 - Do you currently use emulators for gaming?
This is one of those where if we had asked this question a couple of years ago, there would have been a lot more people using emulators considering there was a more limited choice of gaming options. We’re pretty fortunate to have a good selection on Linux, many of which are very actively developed.
Unique Question 2 - How's your interest in Shadow of Mordor?
It’s pretty safe to say that Shadow of Mordor is a very popular game. As far as I recall, this has been the most popular game featured in the unique questions on the survey. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Is this possible to display graphics in the right order?
I mean when there are answers as "Yes > Rather Yes > Neutral > Rather No > No", they always are displayed mixed up (most votes first) leading to useless graphics.
How I think it should be:
Q3 = No, i don't have Windows partition > No > Yes (join both "No" answers with "No Windows at all" on end)
Q8 = Nvidia > AMD > AMD integrated > Intel (join both "AMD" answers)
Q9 = Proprietary > Don't know > Open Source ("don't know" could be one or the other)
Q12 = None > 1-2 > 3-5 > 6-10 > 11+
UQ2 = No plans to buy > Will buy if > Planning to buy > Already bought
Why not both?
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Yeah, I was actually going to comment on that in the article (or maybe I did in last month's one?). Both types of questions have their advantages and disadvantages. I'll think about adding it in for the October survey... For now you can get an idea of how much is being spent if you look at the retailers question: less purchases from bundles would, generally speaking, mean more money being spent per game.
This has been a recurring joke every month, but since *buntu 15.04, there is actually an option to install proprietary updates for Intel and AMD CPUs, so could be that. It's most likely just miss-clicks though.
Yeah, you're right. That's how it's actually displayed in the survey itself, but the little program Feds wrote up to generate the graphs seems to order them by popularity (which makes sense on some questions, but not on others). I'll let him know about it. He's also looking at doing tables to go along with the graphs, which would make that issue a bit more redundant anyway (hopefully that should be here next month, but no guarantee).
Last edited by Segata Sanshiro on 13 September 2015 at 10:16 pm UTC
I am one of the probably 12 or so people in that new category. Hopefully respondents understand the distinction of integrated vs dedicated.
I kind of alluded to this in the article as well. Some people will over-estimate and some will under-estimate - there's not much we can do about that. But what the survey does very well in this case is show us trends, like whether people are buying more or less games as whole over time.
Unless you have a two-part question: 'What currency do you use? How much did you spend?'. Then the results could be collated by currency.
That's another issue as well, and one which I wouldn't really be prepared to resolve, the time could be spent improving other aspects of the survey and not ensuring we have the correct FOREX figures every month. It would be more straightforward to ask the respondent to convert to USD themselves, but I don't know how many people would actually bother filling out the survey if it meant digging into receipts, calculating how much they spent every month and then converting it to another currency.
In theory it's a nice idea and it would be a great statistic to have, but considering we can already get insights into how many games people are buying and also get an idea of how much through the retailers question, it really doesn't seem worth it, especially considering that there's no guarantee that the results we get would be accurate at all.
0-10$ (cheap games)
10-30$ (inexpensive games)
30-50$ (expensive games)
+50$ (very expensive games)
As stated above, this would be quite unfair, given regional pricing, giving more or less weight to respondents depending on their location. Take for example Shadow of Mordor, according to SteamDB, the game costs $49.99 in the USA, $56.31 in Europe, and $13.32 in Russia :/
And this is not the most unevenly priced game...
I probably paid more for Shadow Of Mordor than the previous two bundles combined (I don't tend to pay much for bundles I'm not that interested in or which only include one or two Linux games).