Every month Valve put out their hardware survey, inside it shows off the market-share of operating systems and Linux has continued to decline.
For September 2017, Linux was at 0.60%. This is far from where Linux market-share on Steam was some time ago, although it has never been all that high anyway.
Here's a chart provided to me by EndeavourAccuracy (thanks!), which shows the unfortunate trend:
There could be many reasons for this, all of which I've probably mentioned before at some point. The one thing I would like to stress though, is that market-share declining doesn't necessarily mean less people. The amount of people using Linux for gaming on Steam, might actually be increasing, just not as quickly as Windows so it gets swallowed up. We know for a fact Steam is constantly growing and perhaps in markets where Linux isn't popular pushing the Linux share down. However, the opposite could obviously be true too.
I don't claim to have any answers on it. All we can do is speculate, since we know nothing about how Valve actually pick the systems that get selected for a survey. We know nothing about the numbers behind the percentages, or well, anything really.
We do need to take into account people who dual-boot, which isn't going to be a small number. Even our own limited survey shows about 31.78% of people also use Windows.
Obviously it's not good to see this trend, but as long as Linux games sell enough for a developer to be happy, that's the main point. Going by the last time I spoke to multiple developers about sales of their Linux games, most games mentioned in that article were selling well above the current percentage of Linux gamers as tracked by Steam.
I highly doubt Feral Interactive would also be announcing another Linux port, if the real amount of Linux gamers was declining either, since the types of titles they port would likely need a lot of sales to be worth it, yet they have two new titles currently being teased for Linux.
What are your thoughts on this?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
Quoting: ShmerlI think people should stop paying attention to Steam survey. Its usefulness is close to zero.This, so many times, this.
Since we know that the survey is given far less frequently to Linux users and we know nothing of how the numbers add up otherwise, it is literally a vague percentage of an unknown number; it is completely useless.
Now, it might possibly be used to indicate minor trends in our percentage, but since we still don't know the total, we can't even be sure of that.
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After seeing all the pessimistic comments, I just wanted to point out a few things:
- Mac marketshare declined too (by 0,3 points which is ~10% of their marketshare compared to a 5% drop for Linux)
- windows 10 marketshare dropped by almost 5 points (that's almost 10 times Linux marketshare!) while windows 7 gained nearly 6 points: clearly people are not that happy about windows 10, which is good news
- /r/linux_gaming on Reddit just broke past 50k subscribers which would indicate that the absolute number of Linux gamers is actually growing. It's just that the gaming market as a whole is getting *much* bigger (probably due to China): we're no longer small fries in the sea, but small fries in the ocean ;)
- Valve does not seem to push Linux recently but to be fair they kinda have to wait for their previous efforts (Vulkan, help with AMD drivers, SDL, etc.) to bear fruits before making another push. Just think that Unity only offered Vulkan as a stable backend very recently. And no game has yet activated it and no other game engine has stable support. These things unfortunately take time.
- currently, moving to Linux for gaming is not an easy endeavour. So most people moving are doing it for a good reason (I know I do). So they are unlikely to go back to Windows on a whim which would suggest again that our numbers are growing, just not as fast as the overall gaming market.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no going back to windows. I'm done with that crappy software that is also now an unstable rolling release with spyware included.
There are enough games on Linux *now* for me to play for a very long time (just with Civ 5 I'm clocking in at nearly 800 hours
).
Feral doesn't seem to want to stop porting to our platform nor does any of the usual suspects among the developers (Klei, Paradox, Frozenbytes, Kalypso, etc.), Wine's DX11 support is seeing serious progress and should be in very good shape next year, engines are making it ever easier to port to Linux, AMD driver are finally getting there (just think how crazy that one alone would have seemed 2-3 years ago) and, yes, Valve will even release a new game (artefact)!
So chill out and happy Tux gaming everyone ^_^
And thanks to all the people that make it possible (@ Feral, Aspyr, Paradox, Unity, Valve, AMD, VP, NVidia, Klei,...) <3
- Mac marketshare declined too (by 0,3 points which is ~10% of their marketshare compared to a 5% drop for Linux)
- windows 10 marketshare dropped by almost 5 points (that's almost 10 times Linux marketshare!) while windows 7 gained nearly 6 points: clearly people are not that happy about windows 10, which is good news
- /r/linux_gaming on Reddit just broke past 50k subscribers which would indicate that the absolute number of Linux gamers is actually growing. It's just that the gaming market as a whole is getting *much* bigger (probably due to China): we're no longer small fries in the sea, but small fries in the ocean ;)
- Valve does not seem to push Linux recently but to be fair they kinda have to wait for their previous efforts (Vulkan, help with AMD drivers, SDL, etc.) to bear fruits before making another push. Just think that Unity only offered Vulkan as a stable backend very recently. And no game has yet activated it and no other game engine has stable support. These things unfortunately take time.
- currently, moving to Linux for gaming is not an easy endeavour. So most people moving are doing it for a good reason (I know I do). So they are unlikely to go back to Windows on a whim which would suggest again that our numbers are growing, just not as fast as the overall gaming market.
As far as I'm concerned, there's no going back to windows. I'm done with that crappy software that is also now an unstable rolling release with spyware included.
There are enough games on Linux *now* for me to play for a very long time (just with Civ 5 I'm clocking in at nearly 800 hours
).Feral doesn't seem to want to stop porting to our platform nor does any of the usual suspects among the developers (Klei, Paradox, Frozenbytes, Kalypso, etc.), Wine's DX11 support is seeing serious progress and should be in very good shape next year, engines are making it ever easier to port to Linux, AMD driver are finally getting there (just think how crazy that one alone would have seemed 2-3 years ago) and, yes, Valve will even release a new game (artefact)!
So chill out and happy Tux gaming everyone ^_^
And thanks to all the people that make it possible (@ Feral, Aspyr, Paradox, Unity, Valve, AMD, VP, NVidia, Klei,...) <3
14 Likes, Who?
The problem is like in my experience, the lack of optimization and drivers.
For example, I use linux for everything, and I use Steam in Linux since the beggining,, that is where I started with steam. Yet later on I decided to invest in a good graphic card. I was really glad of how much it improve my experience in Linux. Yet, there was something always bothering me, it still looks very slow sometimes, and I was just dissapointed with graphic cards, I could not believe that even the latest graphic cards could not handle games very well. Later I decided to try for the first time in windows, and wooow to my amazement, even though I hate to admit it, but in windows the performance of the games was 2 or 3 times better. So I had no other choice but to use windows otherwise I could not take all the juice out of the graphica card that I bought.
For example, I use linux for everything, and I use Steam in Linux since the beggining,, that is where I started with steam. Yet later on I decided to invest in a good graphic card. I was really glad of how much it improve my experience in Linux. Yet, there was something always bothering me, it still looks very slow sometimes, and I was just dissapointed with graphic cards, I could not believe that even the latest graphic cards could not handle games very well. Later I decided to try for the first time in windows, and wooow to my amazement, even though I hate to admit it, but in windows the performance of the games was 2 or 3 times better. So I had no other choice but to use windows otherwise I could not take all the juice out of the graphica card that I bought.
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Quoting: finaldestSteam supposedly had,
7 million users in January 2014
15 million users as of September 2017
Linux share has roughly halved during this time frame.
That's only the peak concurrent users, though one could make the case that it's representative of the global trend.
IIRC Steam has a total of around 150 millions users.
Monthly active users was at 67 millions this summer (https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-active-user-count-game-sales-region/)
So that would make ~400k monthly active penguins ;)
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Comandante Ñoñardo Oct 3, 2017
A Linux exclusive AAA game with super amazing graphics and gameplay is the only thing that can revert this trend...
You see.. Most PC gamers install an illegal windows distro just for to play (legally or illegally) the game of the moment..
If there is an Ultra AAA game and is Linux exclusive, they will come to Linux just for to play this game.
You see.. Most PC gamers install an illegal windows distro just for to play (legally or illegally) the game of the moment..
If there is an Ultra AAA game and is Linux exclusive, they will come to Linux just for to play this game.
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no_information_here Oct 3, 2017
Quoting: ShmerlI think people should stop paying attention to Steam survey. Its usefulness is close to zero.I agree. Until Valve releases the actual statistical methodology, we are arguing over pseudoscience.
If it wasn't such a tired meme, I would shout "fake news." We really know nothing of any substance about how the survey works. We might as well read tea-leaves instead.
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I wonder what portion of the Steam survey is answered by card farming "bots." Hell, I wonder if answering the survey even matters at all? Maybe choosing no gives it to another person with the exact same hardware/software setup as you (it would explain why Linux users seem to get fewer surveys since they are more eager to answer them).
Also updating or downgrading Nvidia driver version at least on Linux can cause the steam survey to retrigger on Linux (and there's probably similar problems on Windows too) so it's not exactly a hard survey to "game."
More and more the Steam survey becomes a statistical anomaly compared to other surveying methods. If this was 538 it would have a very low credibility rating because of this.
Also updating or downgrading Nvidia driver version at least on Linux can cause the steam survey to retrigger on Linux (and there's probably similar problems on Windows too) so it's not exactly a hard survey to "game."
More and more the Steam survey becomes a statistical anomaly compared to other surveying methods. If this was 538 it would have a very low credibility rating because of this.
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I wonder how many people tried Steam on Linux only to just switch back to Windows due to issues? Reading the Steam Linux and Universe forums, I sometimes see threads of people asking for help with their Linux problems then someone replying days or weeks later, followed by the poster saying things like... "Thanks for responding, I gave up and went back to Windows but your suggestion might be helpful for someone." I've personally seen this a couple times.
I sort of switched back to Windows myself but not due to games but the Linux graphics and X stack causing frequent system hard locking, complete with a black screen and this just doesn't occur for me on Windows. I find Linux to be a more stable experience inside a Virtual Machine than bare-metal and therefore I switched to using Linux (Antergos) as my primary OS on-top of a Windows 10 host by turning off the spyware telemetry & automatic update service and killing the Windows shell and automatically booting the virtual machine in full-screen (without any top toolbars) immediately following logging into Windows. Then I created some basic scripts that allow the virtual machine to communicate with the Windows host via a Windows SSH server, so that I can open Windows host programs and games and perform system shutdown and reboot functions from within the Linux guest, never touching the Windows shell. Windows games work great with only a few FPS drop (1% to 3% drop at most) and therefore has none of the problems that Wine has. Furthermore since VMware Player 14 offers OpenGL 3.3 support, many Linux games will also work inside the VM. My scripts can launch the explorer shell on demand if needed with the 'shell' argument, though.
I put the download link for my customized VM image (based on Antergos), scripts, and installer on my GitHub page if anyone who dual-boots with Windows wants to give it a try. Unfortunately, I have only tested it with Windows 10 but maybe 7 and 8.x might work too.
https://github.com/XaeroVincent/vmscripts
Last edited by Xaero_Vincent on 3 October 2017 at 2:36 am UTC
I sort of switched back to Windows myself but not due to games but the Linux graphics and X stack causing frequent system hard locking, complete with a black screen and this just doesn't occur for me on Windows. I find Linux to be a more stable experience inside a Virtual Machine than bare-metal and therefore I switched to using Linux (Antergos) as my primary OS on-top of a Windows 10 host by turning off the spyware telemetry & automatic update service and killing the Windows shell and automatically booting the virtual machine in full-screen (without any top toolbars) immediately following logging into Windows. Then I created some basic scripts that allow the virtual machine to communicate with the Windows host via a Windows SSH server, so that I can open Windows host programs and games and perform system shutdown and reboot functions from within the Linux guest, never touching the Windows shell. Windows games work great with only a few FPS drop (1% to 3% drop at most) and therefore has none of the problems that Wine has. Furthermore since VMware Player 14 offers OpenGL 3.3 support, many Linux games will also work inside the VM. My scripts can launch the explorer shell on demand if needed with the 'shell' argument, though.
I put the download link for my customized VM image (based on Antergos), scripts, and installer on my GitHub page if anyone who dual-boots with Windows wants to give it a try. Unfortunately, I have only tested it with Windows 10 but maybe 7 and 8.x might work too.
https://github.com/XaeroVincent/vmscripts
Last edited by Xaero_Vincent on 3 October 2017 at 2:36 am UTC
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orochi_kyo Oct 3, 2017
I cant hardly believe Im on gamingonlinux, this looks more like the Steam forums when everyone loves to speculate about "how much dead" is linux and how Valve is the bad guy.
That guy who said every gamer out there just want to play AAA sh!t, well Sherlock, maybe many are waiting for PES, but not every of us are behind COD, PES, FIFA or NFS sh!t, sorry if that disappoint you bro.
Those who say Valve didnt tried enough and actually games came to Linux by themselves, please if that is some kind of joke, please make it to sound funny at least. Nobody had actually tried to do nothing for linux in terms of gaming but Valve. If most of you are just giving up because these numbers, well, dont blame Valve when Linux player base behaves likes democrats blaming everyone else for their lost but themselves. Stop using that Linux distros which arent made for games, I just heard how about Archlinux is broken with this game or that game, stop using those distros.
Then its fun how people are forgetting that Steam is growing, everyday newbies make accounts to buy games, as the PC playerbase is growing faster, the first stop for the rookie PC gamer is WINDOWS. Dont come as you didnt know that, everybody here was or still is Windows user.
So PC gaming is growing fast, new countries are being taken into account and most of new PC gamers are using Windows, because they come from consoles. So take it with a grain of salt, and instead of whining or speculate, help others to make their way to Linux easier, and stop recommending Arch Linux, Ubuntu and Steam OS should be the way.
Linux problem is easy to guess, too MANY DISTROS, most of them doesnt receive updates or has broken drivers.
Last edited by orochi_kyo on 3 October 2017 at 3:41 am UTC
That guy who said every gamer out there just want to play AAA sh!t, well Sherlock, maybe many are waiting for PES, but not every of us are behind COD, PES, FIFA or NFS sh!t, sorry if that disappoint you bro.
Those who say Valve didnt tried enough and actually games came to Linux by themselves, please if that is some kind of joke, please make it to sound funny at least. Nobody had actually tried to do nothing for linux in terms of gaming but Valve. If most of you are just giving up because these numbers, well, dont blame Valve when Linux player base behaves likes democrats blaming everyone else for their lost but themselves. Stop using that Linux distros which arent made for games, I just heard how about Archlinux is broken with this game or that game, stop using those distros.
Then its fun how people are forgetting that Steam is growing, everyday newbies make accounts to buy games, as the PC playerbase is growing faster, the first stop for the rookie PC gamer is WINDOWS. Dont come as you didnt know that, everybody here was or still is Windows user.
So PC gaming is growing fast, new countries are being taken into account and most of new PC gamers are using Windows, because they come from consoles. So take it with a grain of salt, and instead of whining or speculate, help others to make their way to Linux easier, and stop recommending Arch Linux, Ubuntu and Steam OS should be the way.
Linux problem is easy to guess, too MANY DISTROS, most of them doesnt receive updates or has broken drivers.
Last edited by orochi_kyo on 3 October 2017 at 3:41 am UTC
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Quoting: natis1Also updating or downgrading Nvidia driver version at least on Linux can cause the steam survey to retrigger on Linux (and there's probably similar problems on Windows too) so it's not exactly a hard survey to "game."
i upgrade the nvidia driver all the time when latest version comes out, yet i have only been getting a survey prompt 3 times during all those years steam on linux.
heck i have gotten more surveys when i launched steam in wine and that happens super rarely
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