Recently, Valve did a presentation about Steam during Indigo 2017 which took place in June. The interesting and not surprising thing here is that Steam just keeps on growing.
I knew Steam would be growing, but I didn't think it would be growing that quickly. By the looks of it, since 2015 they're about 2.4 million away from doubling the concurrent users record. It might sound like a lot, but they've already gone from 8.4 to 14 million.
I believe that the decline of Linux in the Steam survey is partly due to the rise of Steam in other markets, where Linux just isn't really popular. According to one of their slides, sales in Asia accounted for 17% total Steam sales for 2017 so far, that's pretty huge, when you consider say Western Europe is only 29% so far this year. From what I remember, Asia has been growing as a market for Steam for the past few years and quite quickly by the looks of it.
When looking at those sorts of percentages, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that growth in markets where Windows is more prevalent will shrink the Linux market share.
They do confirm that a UI update is coming as well, which will update a lot of ways you interact with Steam. This will affect curators, developers and normal users, like this slide gives you an idea of:
You can check out this post with many more slide pictures.
It's also interesting to see this page that Steam has, showing the number of support requests sent them in the last 24 hours. Over 200K of them were for refunds, wow! Surprising to see the technical support requests being so low as well at under 4K. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I knew Steam would be growing, but I didn't think it would be growing that quickly. By the looks of it, since 2015 they're about 2.4 million away from doubling the concurrent users record. It might sound like a lot, but they've already gone from 8.4 to 14 million.
I believe that the decline of Linux in the Steam survey is partly due to the rise of Steam in other markets, where Linux just isn't really popular. According to one of their slides, sales in Asia accounted for 17% total Steam sales for 2017 so far, that's pretty huge, when you consider say Western Europe is only 29% so far this year. From what I remember, Asia has been growing as a market for Steam for the past few years and quite quickly by the looks of it.
When looking at those sorts of percentages, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that growth in markets where Windows is more prevalent will shrink the Linux market share.
They do confirm that a UI update is coming as well, which will update a lot of ways you interact with Steam. This will affect curators, developers and normal users, like this slide gives you an idea of:
You can check out this post with many more slide pictures.
It's also interesting to see this page that Steam has, showing the number of support requests sent them in the last 24 hours. Over 200K of them were for refunds, wow! Surprising to see the technical support requests being so low as well at under 4K. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Gaming is growing in general. For example GOG added Chinese section to their forums recently. And they show users growth every year as well.
See https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2017/05/cd-projekt-group-results-in-1q-2017-1.pdf
One can guess from the increase in sales revenues, but are there actual numbers for users?
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The fact that Linux can keep itself around the 1% mark all the time despite all the growing going on at Steam shows that the number of people on Linux there is growing more or less in the same pace. Remember when we were ≃1% of 10 million? Well, now we are ≃1% of 14 million! But still "the market is too small", amirite....?No, the ≃1% is of [active monthly users](http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey), which the above slide says is 67 million. We have no stats for peak concurrent Linux users.
What is interesting is that this shows that the [125 million "active" users accounts](https://kotaku.com/there-are-over-125-million-steam-accounts-1687820875), Valve talked about back in 2015, are not actually used all that often.
Last edited by N30N on 5 Jul 2017 at 9:50 pm UTC
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I wonder – what Western Europe means there? Is it European Union? Is it geographic Western Europe (west of Germany)? Is it everything west of Russian territories (= European part of Russia?)? Does it include Central European part of the Union, does it include Belarus and Ukraine?
Western Europe according to this definition is formed by countries with dominant Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, including countries which are considered part of Central Europe now:
Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.
just google! it knows everything!
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Am I the only one excited as hell for the new UI or what?
I freaking love when things get new UIs I know a lot of people don't.
I freaking love when things get new UIs I know a lot of people don't.
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Any idea of what the new UI code is written in ? If it is QT that would be pretty sweet.
It's probably going to still be good old Steam with just some modifications to the look and feel (probably mostly on the library part). I highly doubt that they do much more than that since that is already probably a collosal amount of work (that they should use for HL3 instead but that is another story) and nobody want radical changes to the software they use everyday.
Also we don't know if we are going to get those modifications at the same time as the Windows users are going to have them, and given Valve time they may not even be released this summer or even this year, so let not rejoice too quickly.
Last edited by Nyamiou on 6 Jul 2017 at 1:02 am UTC
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Gaming is growing in general. For example GOG added Chinese section to their forums recently. And they show users growth every year as well.
See https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2017/05/cd-projekt-group-results-in-1q-2017-1.pdf
One can guess from the increase in sales revenues, but are there actual numbers for users?
I surely saw some document about it. I'll try to find it.
UPDATE: I can't find it now, some documents are missing from their site. You can also try searching for their presentations on Youtube.
Last edited by Shmerl on 6 Jul 2017 at 2:33 am UTC
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[quote=Mal]
And considering they claimed they don't do business in Australia.
Oceania beats latin america in sales oO[/and quote]
Considering how much companies overcharge prices in that region it is not that surprising at all.
And considering they claimed they don't do business in Australia.
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Just please god tell me they aren't going to do that stupid monochromatic UI like in those leaked images a while back where even the game art in the library all had a monochromatic filter applied.
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qptain Nemo 6 Jul 2017
Am I the only one excited as hell for the new UI or what?Me too! Although I'm a little bit conflicted because I just installed a custom skin for Steam (pressure) which I like and it will probably become useless after the update, at least for a little while, so I'm also a little bummed. :D
I freaking love when things get new UIs I know a lot of people don't.
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I hope they will add the search filters from the shop page to the games library.
When searching for games that have local / online multiplayer or coop play you are forced to look up each game separately.
I have several hundred games in my library so that might take a while.
This really annoys me about steam.
Last edited by Wendigo on 6 Jul 2017 at 7:04 am UTC
When searching for games that have local / online multiplayer or coop play you are forced to look up each game separately.
I have several hundred games in my library so that might take a while.
This really annoys me about steam.
Last edited by Wendigo on 6 Jul 2017 at 7:04 am UTC
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I hope they will add the search filters from the shop page to the games library.
When searching for games that have local / online multiplayer or coop play you are forced to look up each game separately.
I have several hundred games in my library so that might take a while.
This really annoys me about steam.
I have manually made categories for that, but information will never be quite comprehensive...
Cross platform multiplayer is also important information. Though for some playing only with Linux and Mac people could be a feature :)
Search that uses tags from store would be so much better as keeping all the information up to date manually can be quite tedious.
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I hope they will add the search filters from the shop page to the games library.
When searching for games that have local / online multiplayer or coop play you are forced to look up each game separately.
I have several hundred games in my library so that might take a while.
This really annoys me about steam.
I have manually made categories for that, but information will never be quite comprehensive...
Cross platform multiplayer is also important information. Though for some playing only with Linux and Mac people could be a feature :)
Search that uses tags from store would be so much better as keeping all the information up to date manually can be quite tedious.
Check out my project:
https://github.com/rcpoison/steam-scraper
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I would also like to point out that the pie chart is about the Steam Sales by region in dollars - with that in mind, the user base in countries where the games are cheaper (per dollar), including Asia, is actually even higher.
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Western Europe according to this definition is formed by countries with dominant Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, including countries which are considered part of Central Europe now:
Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.
just google! it knows everything!
Could you specify what definition? Where exactly did you get that info from? There [are many](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Religion) [different](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Cold_War) [definitions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Western_European_Union) [of Western Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#CIA_definitions), and I cannot find what definition does Valve use. Or what is their definition of “Russian Territory” for that matter (is that European Russia? Are those former Soviet Republics of USSR, including Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia?). Also I see they [used to use the term ‘Eastern Europe’ in 2014](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/208674/A_geographical_breakdown_of_Steam_sales_in_charts.php) which is not listed in the newer charts in the article we’re commenting under.
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Perkeleen_Vittupää 6 Jul 2017
How about some GOG Galaxy already...
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I wonder – what Western Europe means there? Is it European Union? Is it geographic Western Europe (west of Germany)? Is it everything west of Russian territories (= European part of Russia?)? Does it include Central European part of the Union, does it include Belarus and Ukraine?I'm guessing it means the non-russian part of europe.
Now we can debate which parts are russian and which are not :-).
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I wonder – what Western Europe means there? Is it European Union? Is it geographic Western Europe (west of Germany)? Is it everything west of Russian territories (= European part of Russia?)? Does it include Central European part of the Union, does it include Belarus and Ukraine?I'm guessing it means the non-russian part of europe.
Now we can debate which parts are russian and which are not :-).
My guess would be the countries that were capitalistic in the cold war.
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That looks pointless to me actually. I don't care about how Steam and it's Windows user base grows.
Valve should encourage Linux usage on Asia , that is the only way i can be happy about this kind of news.
The bigger the PC gaming market grows, the better it gets.
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I'd be content if Steam's UI:
That being said, I still get excited every time I hear that Steam is gonna improve ... well, anything really. :P
Last edited by Nanobang on 6 Jul 2017 at 1:39 pm UTC
- were waaayyyy lighter in Big Picture Mode;
- allowed me to zoom in/out so I could easily see things on the lighter, more stable desktop client;
- allowed me to *#^%!! broadcast!
That being said, I still get excited every time I hear that Steam is gonna improve ... well, anything really. :P
Last edited by Nanobang on 6 Jul 2017 at 1:39 pm UTC
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Western Europe according to this definition is formed by countries with dominant Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, including countries which are considered part of Central Europe now:
Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.
just google! it knows everything!
Could you specify what definition? Where exactly did you get that info from? There [are many](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Religion) [different](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Cold_War) [definitions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#Western_European_Union) [of Western Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Europe#CIA_definitions), and I cannot find what definition does Valve use. Or what is their definition of “Russian Territory” for that matter (is that European Russia? Are those former Soviet Republics of USSR, including Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia?). Also I see they [used to use the term ‘Eastern Europe’ in 2014](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/208674/A_geographical_breakdown_of_Steam_sales_in_charts.php) which is not listed in the newer charts in the article we’re commenting under.
Aren't these Steam pricing regions? I know that e.g. Poland now has the same prices as the rest of EU, so I'd say Poland is in the Western Europe pricing region. Perhaps the old Eastern Europe region got merged with Western Europe a while ago and all "new EU member states" were moved to the Western Europe region.
I bought a key for Dishonored at one of reseller outlets and it is now in my library as Dishonored RU, so probably the key was for the Russian pricing region, where prices are lower. Surprising I could add it to my library. I don't know if Ukraine, Belarus or Moldova have Russian prices or Western European prices, but I'd expect our Ukrainian friends to be pissed off at Valve if they are a part of "Russian Territories" :)
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