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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I 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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Steam 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 3 Oct 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 3 Oct 2017
I 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 Oct 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 Oct 2017 at 2:36 am UTC
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orochi_kyo 3 Oct 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 Oct 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 Oct 2017 at 3:41 am UTC
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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."
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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ShoNuff!!! 3 Oct 2017
Linux problem is easy to guess, too MANY DISTROS, most of them doesnt receive updates or has broken drivers.
So.. about the drivers: I wanted to agree with what you wrote but I think the issues is most of the recent linux software is packaged as rpm or .deb --> Back in the day ;-) source package compile was always an option (for the most part). Sure you can use alien or whatever to make it more user friendly to install a package for other distros that aren't Red Hat or Ubuntu... but that is way too much effort for a newbie or someone fed up of a decade of this non-sense.
Example, I have a Vega 64 gpu that I can not use in my Arch build (no working driver from package manager)... and going to the manufacturer site there is no source file to compile. Sure, I can expertly build a kernel and get it working but for gods sake... it is frustrating/tiring that in 2017 (soon to be 2018) for simple things not to work and have to go thru that level of effort only because rpm and deb packages are the only choice.
Last edited by ShoNuff!!! on 3 Oct 2017 at 4:37 am UTC
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cRaZy-bisCuiT 3 Oct 2017
I really don't get what your guys problem is. Actually I'm playing games on Linux because it's my main and almost only system I do use and love. I don't care about any numbers as long as I got good games.
The only thing I hope is that there'll be enough players in the future to justify Linux game development.
Even if there wouldn't I won't skip back to Windows, instead just sticking with what I got and play less since I don't have time anyways.
But as long as (good) indie titlesbabd (Feral) AAA titles are floating in I don't see your problem.
The only thing I hope is that there'll be enough players in the future to justify Linux game development.
Even if there wouldn't I won't skip back to Windows, instead just sticking with what I got and play less since I don't have time anyways.
But as long as (good) indie titlesbabd (Feral) AAA titles are floating in I don't see your problem.
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ShoNuff!!! 3 Oct 2017
I really don't get what your guys problem is. Actually I'm playing games on Linux because it's my main and almost only system I do use and love. I don't care about any numbers as long as I got good games
That's all fine... if you are ok what with you have but most hardcore gamers want the best new games available (not diminishing anyone that chooses to go no tux no bucks (because I was that guy up till 2 weeks ago)... but most want the AAA stuff... not just the good indie games. Saying I am ok with what I have as a linux gamer is not accounting/acknowledging the collective majority of other people... I would wager most want the games most played (especially those of us that enjoy online multiplayer).
Last edited by ShoNuff!!! on 3 Oct 2017 at 4:37 am UTC
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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
Exactly the same here.
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lucifertdark 3 Oct 2017
I've had the survey pop up exactly 3 times since the Linux version of Steam became a reality, how are they supposed to get an accurate user level number if they're not counting all the users?
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I have to agree cRaZy-bisCuiT, I'm using Linux as my daily driver because I prefer it, and I severely dislike the idiotic politics around windows, and I can't bring myself to trust any large corporation (they have repeatedly shown they cannot be trusted) so will not go back to windows.
I don't care if there is some fancy new game that people rage about, I only care that I have good games to play every now and then, which I have ample of on Linux.
Heck, I'm gaming on a 5.5 year old laptop with AMD graphics, and strangely all the games I try work fine on it.
I don't care if there is some fancy new game that people rage about, I only care that I have good games to play every now and then, which I have ample of on Linux.
Heck, I'm gaming on a 5.5 year old laptop with AMD graphics, and strangely all the games I try work fine on it.
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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
Exactly the same here.
IDK I updated and downgraded the Nvidia driver to about 9 different versions trying to fix a problem with Torchlight 2 and half way through doing that my computer got a survey (it was the middle of the month and I had launched steam plenty of times before). Naturally though, I've gotten probably about 3 surveys on Linux in 2 years across 3 computers which is 0.5 surveys per computer-year, but I've definitely been luckier than the average Linux user.
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I have been using Steam in Linux ever since it was available, and I've never filled out a survey, nor seen one for that matter. I can't be the only person this is happening to, so I have to question how many Linux users there really are. I would guess double to triple what the reports are saying, or maybe even more.
Funny thing, I got a survey prompt while booted into Win7. There was only two options: submit now, or not participate.
Thanks, Valve, for helping me be represented correctly.
- 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.
Oh, if you've been paying attention to the SteamVR update news you'd know they are ABSOLUTELY building up to something. SteamVR Home (crossplatform) and Linux are getting the bulk of their VR software team's attention.
Last edited by roothorick on 3 Oct 2017 at 5:54 am UTC
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legluondunet 3 Oct 2017
And what about the linux game sales on GOG?
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