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The latest Steam Hardware Survey has been released and this time around Linux has actually increased the share by a small amount.
I know, I stopped writing about these for a while because the numbers we're talking about here are a little boring and I don't see it changing much any time soon.
Anyway, here's the current Linux market-share on Steam:
Total Overall: Linux 0.81% +0.05%
Despite popular belief, I consider it to be pretty accurate of the state of things on Steam. Yes it may be different elsewhere, but Steam is serving the gamer market. Every time I talk to a developer, they generally give me sales figures around that mark. We can make any wild claims we like about it being inaccurate, but if it was, more developers would be seeing a different story.
Sure Steam Big Picture and SteamOS aren't counted, but those are likely quite a minority.
Does it paint a terrible picture? Well, not exactly. 0.81% of the overall Steam user-base is still a pretty large amount of people. We have no idea just how many active accounts Steam has right now, but every time they talk about it, it's risen by quite a lot. The last time they spoke about it (end of 2015), it was at 125 million. That would put Linux gamers at well over a million, but that number is likely higher now due to Steam's growth since they last talked about it. How high is anyone's guess, since Valve aren't massively open about that.
Not enough to turn the heads of some important publishers sure, but we have a healthy amount of games flowing in constantly to keep me happy.
Where Linux gaming is right now, is pretty great. We only have to look back a short number of years to remember the great drought of games we had. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I know, I stopped writing about these for a while because the numbers we're talking about here are a little boring and I don't see it changing much any time soon.
Anyway, here's the current Linux market-share on Steam:
Total Overall: Linux 0.81% +0.05%
- Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS 64 bit 0.23% 0.00%
- Ubuntu 17.04 64 bit 0.10% +0.10%
- Linux 64 bit 0.08% 0.00%
- Linux Mint 18.1 Serena 64 bit 0.08% +0.01%
Despite popular belief, I consider it to be pretty accurate of the state of things on Steam. Yes it may be different elsewhere, but Steam is serving the gamer market. Every time I talk to a developer, they generally give me sales figures around that mark. We can make any wild claims we like about it being inaccurate, but if it was, more developers would be seeing a different story.
Sure Steam Big Picture and SteamOS aren't counted, but those are likely quite a minority.
Does it paint a terrible picture? Well, not exactly. 0.81% of the overall Steam user-base is still a pretty large amount of people. We have no idea just how many active accounts Steam has right now, but every time they talk about it, it's risen by quite a lot. The last time they spoke about it (end of 2015), it was at 125 million. That would put Linux gamers at well over a million, but that number is likely higher now due to Steam's growth since they last talked about it. How high is anyone's guess, since Valve aren't massively open about that.
Not enough to turn the heads of some important publishers sure, but we have a healthy amount of games flowing in constantly to keep me happy.
Where Linux gaming is right now, is pretty great. We only have to look back a short number of years to remember the great drought of games we had. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I do agree that the steam survey is fairly accurate but it would be nice to somehow collate a list of sales from GOG, Itch.io, Gamejolt, Ferral Store, Steam, SteamOS etc.. all into one. At last calculation there were 90million Linux desktop users in the world. Obviously not all of those people game or have the hardware to game.. but i think there is more to the picture than just the Steam survey when judging Linux gaming success.
4 Likes, Who?
When I barely get the steam survey and that is the same issue with my daughters computer. It makes you wonder how accurate the survey really is, it should be pushed out to everyone once a month.
1 Likes, Who?
When I barely get the steam survey and that is the same issue with my daughters computer. It makes you wonder how accurate the survey really is, it should be pushed out to everyone once a month.You realize it's a survey, right? Of course it doesn't capture everyone or the same people each month. It is meant to show trends.
People seem to misunderstand what a survey does.
5 Likes, Who?
So, it's basically stable, cause it has been hovering around 0.8% as far as I remember.
0 Likes
no_information_here Jun 2, 2017
The thing with a statistical test is that it should be carefully set up with an explicit testing methodology. I don't care how brilliant Steam's engineers are, if they just slapped the hardware survey together then it probably does not actually test what they think it does. Of all the mathematical sciences, statistics is the easiest to delude yourself with.
As for all the rest of us, until the methodology is made public, the statistic is frankly useless. Yes, it may match up with other anecdotal numbers (small developer sales) but, as we should know by now, the plural of anecdote is not data.
As for all the rest of us, until the methodology is made public, the statistic is frankly useless. Yes, it may match up with other anecdotal numbers (small developer sales) but, as we should know by now, the plural of anecdote is not data.
8 Likes, Who?
When I barely get the steam survey and that is the same issue with my daughters computer. It makes you wonder how accurate the survey really is, it should be pushed out to everyone once a month.You realize it's a survey, right? Of course it doesn't capture everyone or the same people each month. It is meant to show trends.
People seem to misunderstand what a survey does.
I 100% understand what the survey does :-) it just would be nice to get a bigger picture of users using Linux, Windows and Mac. I understand that the stats can go down and up but the survey does not really tell the bigger picture of how many users are using an OS. Just my thought that would be nice to get a bigger picture of user base.
0 Likes
lucifertdark Jun 2, 2017
I got the survey too, for the first time this year.
1 Likes, Who?
I don't get it. Why Steam publishes information about users from surveys instead from analytics of running Steam clients?
It would make much more sense to have analytics per month with:
- max / min / average daily users,
- max / min / average users at the same time,
- overall hours steam clients been running.
I have never had Steam survey and I was using multiple machines, multiple Wine prefixes and multiple distributions.
Measuring market share from Steam survey makes no sense.
And I don't say Linux market would be bigger, because most of the game sales published on this site say Linux is about 0.5 - 2 percent, but I would consider such a data much more useful than Steam survey.
P.S. if someone would say that such an analytics would be too much to infrastructure, I would laugh, because I can't imagine such a big system without analytics data. So I'm confident Steam collects such a data.
It would make much more sense to have analytics per month with:
- max / min / average daily users,
- max / min / average users at the same time,
- overall hours steam clients been running.
I have never had Steam survey and I was using multiple machines, multiple Wine prefixes and multiple distributions.
Measuring market share from Steam survey makes no sense.
And I don't say Linux market would be bigger, because most of the game sales published on this site say Linux is about 0.5 - 2 percent, but I would consider such a data much more useful than Steam survey.
P.S. if someone would say that such an analytics would be too much to infrastructure, I would laugh, because I can't imagine such a big system without analytics data. So I'm confident Steam collects such a data.
0 Likes
The difference may simply lie in the right to publish that data. People who participate in the survey willingly submit their info for inclusion in the survey.
1 Likes, Who?
when steam hit the active users of 125mil mark it had 8.9mil concurrent users. In January 2017 Steam had 14mil, considering how the amount of Linux user sort of dropped % wise. it would be because of a surge of new players.
considering the average of concurrent users when up an average of 62%. which would put steam roughly 202mil active users. Linux users are roughly 1.25mil in February 2015. and are now approximately 1.6mil in 2017 so far.
considering the average of concurrent users when up an average of 62%. which would put steam roughly 202mil active users. Linux users are roughly 1.25mil in February 2015. and are now approximately 1.6mil in 2017 so far.
3 Likes, Who?
Funny, i play Low Magic Age on Steam via PlayOnLinux, and i get the survey. I think i got the survey 3 or 4 times in 2016-2017, everytime via PlayOnLinux, while it's maybe 10 to 20% of my play time...
1 Likes, Who?
I completely disagree, this survey is unclear in his methods and we know that it doesn't cover some parts of the community which we have no way to say if they are actually such a minority. Also people get the wrong idea about this survey, it's the active users, not the active buyers, a lot of people have Steam to play only one game and never buy anything.
Also saying that it match up with sales numbers is not true, developers have been reporting Linux sales between 1 to 3 percent of all sales. 1% is already 25% more than 0.8%, that's a huge difference.
Just because a survey happens to be in the range of what we know is possible it doesn't make it automatically legitimate.
Also saying that it match up with sales numbers is not true, developers have been reporting Linux sales between 1 to 3 percent of all sales. 1% is already 25% more than 0.8%, that's a huge difference.
Just because a survey happens to be in the range of what we know is possible it doesn't make it automatically legitimate.
7 Likes, Who?
when steam hit the active users of 125mil mark it had 8.9mil concurrent users. In January 2017 Steam had 14mil, considering how the amount of Linux user sort of dropped % wise. it would be because of a surge of new players.
considering the average of concurrent users when up an average of 62%. which would put steam roughly 202mil active users. Linux users are roughly 1.25mil in February 2015. and are now approximately 1.6mil in 2017 so far.
Yes, steam has expanded really fast, and is expanding faster in Asia. So if Asia has relatively lower linux percentage, even if linux is expanding everywhere including Asia, then its percentage on steam will fall. I think this is really what is happening. The expansion of steam in Asia makes linux percentage drop (or at least not rise)
It would be really interesting if we could see percentages per country
Last edited by lucinos on 2 June 2017 at 7:16 pm UTC
3 Likes, Who?
Still no entry in " Vulkan Systems" section.
VULKAN SYSTEMS (LINUX OR POST-XP WINDOWS WITH VULKAN GPU)
Blank
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/
VULKAN SYSTEMS (LINUX OR POST-XP WINDOWS WITH VULKAN GPU)
Blank
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/directx/
0 Likes
From what I've heard, read on the net and from my experience you get the survey more likely when you haven't started steam for a while. As Windows is still the lead platform for gaming, and also from the survey here on gol (a third), a lot of gamers seems to dual boot.
Now it would be interesting, how people are using this. Do they mainly run Linux and boot Windows just for some games that aren't available to Linux, or the other way round? Like, being mostly with Windows online and boot just for some games into Linux?
If it's the mostly the first scenario, I could image that the number of Linux gamers would be a noticeably higher than shown on the survey. Because the probability to get the survey on Windows would be higher. Same with macos.
Nevertheless, another thing how well a game is doing on Linux seems to depend on the game itself. I've never heard of a game that has done so well on Linux like Thimbleweek Park. I mean, one third of all sales were made on Linux?! That's quite an awesome number! If that would apply to all games, we would be set :D
Now it would be interesting, how people are using this. Do they mainly run Linux and boot Windows just for some games that aren't available to Linux, or the other way round? Like, being mostly with Windows online and boot just for some games into Linux?
If it's the mostly the first scenario, I could image that the number of Linux gamers would be a noticeably higher than shown on the survey. Because the probability to get the survey on Windows would be higher. Same with macos.
Nevertheless, another thing how well a game is doing on Linux seems to depend on the game itself. I've never heard of a game that has done so well on Linux like Thimbleweek Park. I mean, one third of all sales were made on Linux?! That's quite an awesome number! If that would apply to all games, we would be set :D
2 Likes, Who?
I don't get it. Why Steam publishes information about users from surveys instead from analytics of running Steam clients?1)some people would count that as spy.
2)maybe they dont want help their competition to know their numbers?
3)too many data to process on their servers?
0 Likes
Joeyboots80 Jun 3, 2017
Slightly is better than not at all or shrinking. I'll take it.
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Wasn't everyone saying that Steam Machines don't get counted in the survey?
In my opinion that is a HUGE factor. Because without counting steam machines you're basically completely ignoring the entire audience behind steam supporting Linux in the first place, and all you're left with is mostly just Linux users who'd probably be using Linux on their desktops even if there was no steam Linux client.
Until we know steam machines are being counted and/or steam adds the survey to steam machines if it's not already, then I personally think this statistic is utterly meaningless.
Last edited by ison111 on 3 June 2017 at 3:48 am UTC
In my opinion that is a HUGE factor. Because without counting steam machines you're basically completely ignoring the entire audience behind steam supporting Linux in the first place, and all you're left with is mostly just Linux users who'd probably be using Linux on their desktops even if there was no steam Linux client.
Until we know steam machines are being counted and/or steam adds the survey to steam machines if it's not already, then I personally think this statistic is utterly meaningless.
Last edited by ison111 on 3 June 2017 at 3:48 am UTC
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Crazy Penguin Jun 3, 2017
When I barely get the steam survey and that is the same issue with my daughters computer. It makes you wonder how accurate the survey really is, it should be pushed out to everyone once a month.You realize it's a survey, right? Of course it doesn't capture everyone or the same people each month. It is meant to show trends.
People seem to misunderstand what a survey does.
What I understand is that it is a crappy survey. Since Valve does this thing on Linux I had it FOUR times. On Windows it pops up every month. Also SteamOS isn't counted still. This survey is BS and has no value.
1 Likes, Who?
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