Something I forgot to write up, was that the latest Steam survey is out. Linux dropped by 0.08% according to the figures.
I always leave it a few days to cover it, as Valve tends to finalize the statistics a few days after it's put out. Originally it said we dropped by 0.01% which wasn't right.
December 2016
Windows 95.75% + 0.35%
OSX 3.31% - 0.28%
Linux 0.80% - 0.08%
I know a lot of people don't have faith in it, but from all the chats I've had with developers it's pretty accurate actually. If it wasn't, we would be seeing vastly different sales figures from developers.
The key thing to remember though, is that a lower percentage does not mean less Linux users. You have to remember that Steam is constantly growing, and every time they talk about the amount of active Steam accounts it has grown by a large amount. Only recently Steam passed 14 million concurrent user accounts online at a time.
To use our own survey as an example here. For the latest results from our Survey Ubuntu-based distributions gained +57 people, but the overall share for Ubuntu-based dropped by 0.69%, this is because all the other distributions gained +82 together, meaning their growth together outpaced Ubuntu-based.
Why is this important to know? Well, it's highly likely the amount of Linux users on Steam is growing, but it's probably dwarfed by Windows (and likely Mac too) growth at the same time so it brings down our market-share.
Nothing to worry about, so if anyone writes about it like it's Linux gaming doomsday, don't believe them. It would be something to worry about if developers started coming along noticing a drop in sales from Linux, but not a single developer has said so.
Keep buying Linux games, keep playing them on Linux and keep going. 2017 is going to be fun! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I always leave it a few days to cover it, as Valve tends to finalize the statistics a few days after it's put out. Originally it said we dropped by 0.01% which wasn't right.
December 2016
Windows 95.75% + 0.35%
OSX 3.31% - 0.28%
Linux 0.80% - 0.08%
I know a lot of people don't have faith in it, but from all the chats I've had with developers it's pretty accurate actually. If it wasn't, we would be seeing vastly different sales figures from developers.
The key thing to remember though, is that a lower percentage does not mean less Linux users. You have to remember that Steam is constantly growing, and every time they talk about the amount of active Steam accounts it has grown by a large amount. Only recently Steam passed 14 million concurrent user accounts online at a time.
To use our own survey as an example here. For the latest results from our Survey Ubuntu-based distributions gained +57 people, but the overall share for Ubuntu-based dropped by 0.69%, this is because all the other distributions gained +82 together, meaning their growth together outpaced Ubuntu-based.
Why is this important to know? Well, it's highly likely the amount of Linux users on Steam is growing, but it's probably dwarfed by Windows (and likely Mac too) growth at the same time so it brings down our market-share.
Nothing to worry about, so if anyone writes about it like it's Linux gaming doomsday, don't believe them. It would be something to worry about if developers started coming along noticing a drop in sales from Linux, but not a single developer has said so.
Keep buying Linux games, keep playing them on Linux and keep going. 2017 is going to be fun! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Today I started steam over wine (for Doom 2016) since a long time and got promptly a survey. :)
Coincidence I think but can't remember when my last survey was. After all wine is recognized by steam as wine.
Last edited by 1xok on 15 January 2017 at 12:49 am UTC
Coincidence I think but can't remember when my last survey was. After all wine is recognized by steam as wine.
Last edited by 1xok on 15 January 2017 at 12:49 am UTC
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GustyGhost Jan 15, 2017
Oh, we must be back on the "Steam survey is inaccurate" side of the pendulum this month.
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I haven't gotten a survey in over a year now. Why is Valve still basing this on a rare survey and not actual login and usage stats?
It hurts us and it hurts Valve too when it makes our platform look weak and on life support.
It hurts us and it hurts Valve too when it makes our platform look weak and on life support.
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Something other about how fast is steam growing these years that needs to be said.
Steam has now more linux games than it had windows games in 2013.
I believe that the "steam growth problem" that linux has is about how fast steam is growing now in Asia and apparently in Asia there are relatively less linux gamers.
Last edited by lucinos on 15 January 2017 at 4:35 am UTC
Steam has now more linux games than it had windows games in 2013.
I believe that the "steam growth problem" that linux has is about how fast steam is growing now in Asia and apparently in Asia there are relatively less linux gamers.
Last edited by lucinos on 15 January 2017 at 4:35 am UTC
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Kimyrielle Jan 15, 2017
Well, it's certainly not doomsday, but I'd still have thought the large supply of Linux games we got in the past two years would have at least helped us to grow -at pace- with the other platforms. But our market share doesn't seem to change at all. One of these days we need to break though the threshold of marginality if we want more publishers to support us. I would think dev studios not supporting Linux are watching our market share - but if we stay below 1% forever, they won't see a good reason to change their attitude.
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Nor Mantis Jan 15, 2017
I don't pay attention to what Steam says. But in my personal life I had more people ask me about Linux in 2016 than any year before. That is a big sign for me when people ask me on their own.
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Oh, we must be back on the "Steam survey is inaccurate" side of the pendulum this month.What? I'm saying it is accurate, have been saying that for quite some time.
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I don't know if it was already discussed or brought up before, but how does Steam take into account Steam users / accounts who dual-boots with Windows and Linux? Do they count it as Windows user?
I think Valve should have a separate statistics for Windows users who also dual-boots with Linux. There are probably Linux gamers who use Windows for games only available on Windows.
If you dual boot, Valve sees that you have two different computers (one windows and one linux). If you dual boot two linux distros, also sees that you have two different computers. I do not know how it weights people who use multiple computers but in principle it is not different to have two computers than to have dual boot.
If you use wine, that is also a different computer that counts as windows but provided by wine, not microsoft.
Last edited by lucinos on 15 January 2017 at 5:33 am UTC
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GustyGhost Jan 15, 2017
What? I'm saying it is accurate, have been saying that for quite some time.
Not directed at you. Just the inevitable responses to any time this number goes down.
Last edited by GustyGhost on 15 January 2017 at 5:35 am UTC
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I don't pay attention to what Steam says. But in my personal life I had more people ask me about Linux in 2016 than any year before. That is a big sign for me when people ask me on their own.Windows 10 is starting to bear fruit :) Several of my friends don't want to "upgrade" and are hearing horror stories about those who did. Meanwhile when I troubleshoot their Windows problems I just jokingly remind them that I don't have those kinds of problems on Linux, without being an ass about it (after all, we have issues of our own). Over time they get curious and start asking me about Linux on their own. I think for many people, trying Linux is too much of a bother, but if the alternative is bad enough and they have someone to guide them through it they'll go for it. And right now the alternatives to Linux are pretty damn awful.
Last edited by Salvatos on 15 January 2017 at 5:51 am UTC
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Its just percentage,not hard number.This is not surprising based on steams recent growth.Linux as desktop OS is gaining overall more users .So steam,Fu.Now the Question is where is ur new game valve?now that u have some experience with moba,why dont u try a medival rts game?
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Well, it's certainly not doomsday, but I'd still have thought the large supply of Linux games we got in the past two years would have at least helped us to grow -at pace- with the other platforms.
Well, I constantly see posts like "I just switched to Linux [because I can play games]", so clearly Linux user base is growing because of the improving gaming situation. But you can't easily measure that growth. I'd surely wouldn't use Steam numbers for that.
But our market share doesn't seem to change at all.Linux market share itself is pretty hard to measure, but according to some measurements - it's growing.
Last edited by Shmerl on 15 January 2017 at 6:26 am UTC
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As long as Valve doesn't fix their Steam runtime to work on more distributions without ugly hacks, workarounds and constant regressions https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/4768 I doubt things will be better.
I have to admit that I just bought a tower that came with Windows 10 recently and I am currently playing some games that simply aren't available on Linux or won't run on my openSUSE X series Thinkpad as it just comes with integrated graphics.
My new system pretty much adheres to what https://system76.com/ sells so I might just buy another SSD and install a Linux partition on it with hopefully little trouble. Anyone knows good looking rally games with force feedback wheel support that run on Linux as well?
If you want some good news: Linux marketshare can be astonishingly high if the port is well done: http://www.openra.net/news/2017-01-stats-post/
Last edited by Milanium on 15 January 2017 at 7:56 am UTC
I have to admit that I just bought a tower that came with Windows 10 recently and I am currently playing some games that simply aren't available on Linux or won't run on my openSUSE X series Thinkpad as it just comes with integrated graphics.
My new system pretty much adheres to what https://system76.com/ sells so I might just buy another SSD and install a Linux partition on it with hopefully little trouble. Anyone knows good looking rally games with force feedback wheel support that run on Linux as well?
If you want some good news: Linux marketshare can be astonishingly high if the port is well done: http://www.openra.net/news/2017-01-stats-post/
Last edited by Milanium on 15 January 2017 at 7:56 am UTC
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Not directed at you. Just the inevitable responses to any time this number goes down.
Thing is, Valve isn't particularly clear how those numbers come to be.
Just recently someone on reddit told me that there was apparently a steam dev or something talk about this once. Some data, including the OS shares, are coming from Steam's telemetry. Things like hardware distribution on the other hand is extrapolated from the surveys. I didn't watch the talk, but that's what I was told.
That would mean that some numbers are pretty accurate, some are less so. But unless Valve puts this information on an about page for people to link to, you'll never get rid of this notion of overall inaccuracy (maybe there is a page I don't know about?).
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Not directed at you. Just the inevitable responses to any time this number goes down.
Thing is, Valve isn't particularly clear how those numbers come to be.
Just recently someone on reddit told me that there was apparently a steam dev or something talk about this once. Some data, including the OS shares, are coming from Steam's telemetry. Things like hardware distribution on the other hand is extrapolated from the surveys. I didn't watch the talk, but that's what I was told.
That would mean that some numbers are pretty accurate, some are less so. But unless Valve puts this information on an about page for people to link to, you'll never get rid of this notion of overall inaccuracy (maybe there is a page I don't know about?).
So you're saying the survey results would include some data gathered from everyone instead of just the survey? That would mean this kind of a miniscule change might actually be meaningful... Any idea where this talk could be found?
Last edited by badber on 15 January 2017 at 11:19 am UTC
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I actually think the Mac share is the headliner here - didn't mac used to have around 7 percent just a couple of years ago?
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Valve their efforts until now have given us ~1% market share on Steam, that is about clear. But what is important to be is that Valve give clear indications they are not done yet. The Steam Dev days with all machines was a sign. But Valve hiring developers to work on AMD drivers? Why would you do that if you don't have business interrests for that?
To me, this is a clear sign that AMD is developing something for Valve. And hiring developers yourself to develop open source drivers might be cheaper than paying AMD to do the same. I don't see any other way how to interpret this.
It also makes sense that the hardware developers that worked on the Steam Link and Steam Controller are not folding paper airplanes at the moment. Does anyone know what they are working on at the moment?
What would AMD be developing for Valve? It should be graphics related. So it is a GPU or an APU. Zen CPU + Polaris GPU + HBM memory?
Steam bomber is coming!
To me, this is a clear sign that AMD is developing something for Valve. And hiring developers yourself to develop open source drivers might be cheaper than paying AMD to do the same. I don't see any other way how to interpret this.
It also makes sense that the hardware developers that worked on the Steam Link and Steam Controller are not folding paper airplanes at the moment. Does anyone know what they are working on at the moment?
What would AMD be developing for Valve? It should be graphics related. So it is a GPU or an APU. Zen CPU + Polaris GPU + HBM memory?
Steam bomber is coming!
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I don't know if it was already discussed or brought up before, but how does Steam take into account Steam users / accounts who dual-boots with Windows and Linux? Do they count it as Windows user?This was shown to me during the survey:
I think Valve should have a separate statistics for Windows users who also dual-boots with Linux. There are probably Linux gamers who use Windows for games only available on Windows.
https://www.olivere.de/download/images/blog/steam/hw_survey_wine.png
Is in German but you can see easily that Valve recognizes Wine as Wine:
"Hersteller: The Wine Project"
"Modell: Wine"
If you are using dual boot instead, you are, of course, counted as Windows users. By the way: Doom 2016 runs excellent under Wine 2.0. I use it under Ubuntu 16.10 with Nvidia binary driver 375.20. For Vulkan I had to install:
sudo apt-get install libvulkan-dev libvulkan1 vulkan-utilsThats all! After this no tearing, no problems, just Doom. :)
So I think dual-boot people should consider from time to time if they could use wine.
EDIT: Had an issue with graphics quality. Need more investigation.
Last edited by 1xok on 15 January 2017 at 10:39 pm UTC
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Hmm... I dont like the steam survey, but as it said in the artikle.
all the other distributions gained +82 together, meaning their growth together outpaced Ubuntu-based.
But I also got the survey more often in windows then in Linux, I do think valve are tracking there users hardware and OS even if you decide to ignor the survey.
I dont really care if Linux is the biggest OS,
I just want people to know there is a free perfectly working OS alternativ that even gives you alot more
freedom compair to the other os's out there.
Also as long as we get good games to play, and the devs behinde big and small titles see Linux as a system they want to support, Im happy.
This might sound dumb, and very off topic.
For some reason I feel more productiv in Linux then I ever was in Windows, I dont know if its the freedom and the way you can accses stuff more easily or if it is the layout.
Windows can stay on the top if they want, mac can be bigger I dont care, I already know what I prefer and Im happy here :).
Last edited by Zelox on 15 January 2017 at 12:49 pm UTC
all the other distributions gained +82 together, meaning their growth together outpaced Ubuntu-based.
But I also got the survey more often in windows then in Linux, I do think valve are tracking there users hardware and OS even if you decide to ignor the survey.
I dont really care if Linux is the biggest OS,
I just want people to know there is a free perfectly working OS alternativ that even gives you alot more
freedom compair to the other os's out there.
Also as long as we get good games to play, and the devs behinde big and small titles see Linux as a system they want to support, Im happy.
This might sound dumb, and very off topic.
For some reason I feel more productiv in Linux then I ever was in Windows, I dont know if its the freedom and the way you can accses stuff more easily or if it is the layout.
Windows can stay on the top if they want, mac can be bigger I dont care, I already know what I prefer and Im happy here :).
Last edited by Zelox on 15 January 2017 at 12:49 pm UTC
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No Linux users should learn how to not dual boot. If you reboot to Windows that is the perfect argument for developers that a Linux port is unnecessary. You are then a Windows customer and are counted correctly as a Windows customer. That you have also Linux installed is business wise irrelevant if you buy Windows games.
Last edited by dmantione on 15 January 2017 at 1:56 pm UTC
Last edited by dmantione on 15 January 2017 at 1:56 pm UTC
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