Valve have put out their usual monthly Steam Hardware Survey, which shows a bigger decline than usual for the Linux marketshare.
Last month, Linux was sat at 0.60%, but as of October it has dropped to 0.35% which is a sharper drop than usual. It's worth noting, that Mac had an even bigger drop.
It's easy to see why though, China is now the biggest market on Steam according to their survey. Simplified Chinese has increased by +26.83% making their share of Steam's market at 56.37%. That's a huge influx of users from that region, which can easily account for the reason Linux has been dropping recently.
When you look at it even further, Windows specifically has 57.45% (an increase of +26.99%) using Simplified Chinese as their language. Compare that with Linux, and only 0.53% (a drop of -0.11%) use Simplified Chinese. Linux just isn't popular in that region, so again, the drop does make sense and can be accounted for.
A large portion of that increase has likely been fuelled by PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS, which is not available on Linux and is the most played game on Steam right now. There's also rumours of it being banned in China, which has likely caused another surge in people taking a look at it.
I should remind you, that a drop in the marketshare doesn't mean less users. It likely means that Windows growth here due to the two above points has just dwarfed any possible increase in Linux gamers on Steam.
I don't see this as any reason to panic, at all. Once the hype around PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS starts to vanish, the numbers will likely start to even out again.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: hardpenguinBut most of Linux users use Steam in English.My whole system runs in English, even though it's not my native tongue. It even runs British English, because otherwise the spellchecking is totally WRONG ;).
Quoting: g000hHere's some Black and White for you..
You play legitimately bought games on pirated Windows - you're a pirate.
You play pirated games on pirated Windows - you're a pirate.
You're wrong of course, because you failed to notice that piracy is defined as robbery on the high seas, whereas this is about copyright infringement.
So not matter how hard you violate Microsofts copyrights on Windows, you're not a pirate. You're just a copyright infringer.
Quoting: SeegrasHuh, same here though I'm russian. There are several reasons behind that. It's much easier to google for any error messages and issues in English, the answers are much more constructive and useful usually (in Russian I often find highly upvoted lame jokes instead of a real solution). Also Steam Linux games have a long history of issues of all sorts when run in other than English locale. Like non-working input or startup crashes. It's being constantly fixed but really it's easier just switch to an English locale and forget about that.Quoting: hardpenguinBut most of Linux users use Steam in English.My whole system runs in English, even though it's not my native tongue. It even runs British English, because otherwise the spellchecking is totally WRONG ;).
And I also use en_GB.UTF-8, not because of spellchecker but because in the US they have that absolutely nonsensical AM/PM bs (they can't even agree on whether midnight is 12 AM or 12 PM, lolwut).
EDIT: Oh, this thread is a month old, haven't noticed.
Last edited by rkfg on 3 December 2017 at 11:28 am UTC
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