As mentioned in my last article talking about the Steam Hardware Survey, Valve sometimes adjusts the numbers a few days later. They have again and this time they adjusted the Linux market share on Steam down, not up.
Originally, the December market share for Linux on Steam was shown as 0.43%, but Valve have revised this down to 0.26%. So that's a decrease of 0.01 percentage points from November to December.
I'll be honest, I was rather surprised to see that the Linux market share on Steam had suddenly shot back up a bit, considering the Windows-only game, PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS is still pulling in a ton of people from the Asian market and is still breaking player records. In hindsight, it didn't really make sense for the Linux share to have risen like that. I still maintain my position that it most definitely will go back up, but that will be once the hype around PUBG fades.
Still, it's strange, as this is the biggest amount Valve has ever revised the survey numbers since I've been covering them. Well, as big as the percentages we're talking about are anyway…
So basically, nothing really changed between November and December. Here's to a strong and stable 2018.
Thanks for the news tip facePlanted.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Anecdotal evidence from my local LUG (Linux User Group)
- Most don't have steam. So 10% of the Linux users to have steam could be accurate.
- A lot, like more than 50%, don't play games.
- Of the rest, quite a few only play drm-free games, some of them have a gog.com account, others only play open-source games.
- There are also a few that only play on console. Usually PS3/4, sometimes Nintendo too, rarely XBox.
And finally
- the avid players usually also have a windows-machine for playing, some even use Windows exclusively for gaming, and don't have steam installed on Linux.
Quoting: BlackBloodRumYou could come to the conclusion that perhaps many Linux users are not using steam for verious reasons, No games of interest? Don't like DRM? Simply don't play games?
- Most don't have steam. So 10% of the Linux users to have steam could be accurate.
- A lot, like more than 50%, don't play games.
- Of the rest, quite a few only play drm-free games, some of them have a gog.com account, others only play open-source games.
- There are also a few that only play on console. Usually PS3/4, sometimes Nintendo too, rarely XBox.
And finally
- the avid players usually also have a windows-machine for playing, some even use Windows exclusively for gaming, and don't have steam installed on Linux.
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Quoting: MaCroX95Quoting: KonA downward trend driven by China is still a downward trend. Yet another reason to improve input method integration in Linux desktops.
Buggy word processing in your native language is a non-starter for any computer system, even one distributed at no cost.
Let's be honest about something, Windows is also native-language only on the surface, when you start messing around with settings and registry everything is in English and that is the same for majority of operating systems, there's just no way any OS can rewrite everything from scratch in all the languages.
I find Linux to be completely compatible with my native language, not sure about Chinese.
Do you need to install and configure "optional" components like ibus or fcitx to write in your language? IME integration is very poor and even when properly configured can cause conflicts and crashes with the DE.
Documentation and translation for non-European languages can also use some work. But even then, what good is it to read the system documentation if you can't write an email to your friends and family?
Last edited by Kon on 8 January 2018 at 12:55 pm UTC
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I prefer these statistics:
-> Net Marketshare - Operating System Market Share
Linux != only gaming != only Steam.
Last edited by KuJo on 8 January 2018 at 1:12 pm UTC
-> Net Marketshare - Operating System Market Share
Linux != only gaming != only Steam.
Last edited by KuJo on 8 January 2018 at 1:12 pm UTC
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My personal approach has long been concentrating on improving ecosystem, buying Linux games and supporting vendors who support Linux platform.
As for actual share of Steam users - while that number might cause mild depression, I am still maintaining actual sales numbers and developer engagement and feel about community matters more. Let's be frank - being a bit over 1% didn't made any big publisher to dip into SteamOS, why would now be any different.
I also agree that just pushing articles for those numbers feels useless. What about having regular reviews of performance, ecosystem, issues and how to solve them? How about best sims on Linux? Best horror games? Best RPGs? Best online games?
Give some meaty articles.
As for actual share of Steam users - while that number might cause mild depression, I am still maintaining actual sales numbers and developer engagement and feel about community matters more. Let's be frank - being a bit over 1% didn't made any big publisher to dip into SteamOS, why would now be any different.
I also agree that just pushing articles for those numbers feels useless. What about having regular reviews of performance, ecosystem, issues and how to solve them? How about best sims on Linux? Best horror games? Best RPGs? Best online games?
Give some meaty articles.
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Mountain Man Jan 8, 2018
Quoting: BrisseWhat it's really counting is the percentage of people who were randomly selected and agree to be counted, which, considering how paranoid a lot of Linux users seem to be, is probably a very small percentage of Linux users on Steam.Quoting: BlackBloodRumIn my opinion the steam survey is a highly unreliable way to count Linux marketshare (as a whole).It doesn't count overall Linux market share, nor is it intended to do so. It counts STEAM USERS ON LINUX and nothing else. Important distinction which a lot of people seem to miss.
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Quoting: Mountain ManQuoting: BrisseWhat it's really counting is the percentage of people who were randomly selected and agree to be counted, which, considering how paranoid a lot of Linux users seem to be, is probably a very small percentage of Linux users on Steam.Quoting: BlackBloodRumIn my opinion the steam survey is a highly unreliable way to count Linux marketshare (as a whole).It doesn't count overall Linux market share, nor is it intended to do so. It counts STEAM USERS ON LINUX and nothing else. Important distinction which a lot of people seem to miss.
Possibly. On the other hand, judging by the comment sections in this type of articles, it seems like Linux users (those who drop comments at least) care a lot about having their platform be more visible in the statistics so I'm not sure which way it goes. Pretty sure Windows users don't care much about the survey though. They have no reason to make their platform more visible to attract more game ports and such.
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Quoting: BasianiAll WINE users, dual booters and VM users are counted as Windows users. So whats matter?
Steam in this moments must be show % of users using wine, this date will be interesting
^_^
Last edited by mrdeathjr on 8 January 2018 at 5:28 pm UTC
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Content is king and at the moment there's not enough AAA content to make me bother firing Steam up again. The other problem is that AAA gaming in general has been pretty lacklustre outside of the Playstation 4 platform.
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This isn't going to change anytime soon. Hell, even if PUBG is released on Linux, you won't see a significant difference in the numbers. People will just use whatever everyone else is using: Windows.
The _only_ chance Linux would see any increase is if there is a successful console out there that is based on SteamOS. Just think about it, would Linux be dominating mobile market if it wasn't for Android/Google? No way, it would probably be even less than %0.1 worldwide.
So, just be thankful we have developers who are willing to release games for this sub 1% market. The good news is that many tools now (UE4/Unity5..etc) make it a lot easier for developers to release for Linux, and so no significant downtime is required to support extra platforms as it was before. As this trend continues, along with Vulkan becoming more stream, this should lead to more games getting released on Linux as a by-product of these technologies maturing.
The _only_ chance Linux would see any increase is if there is a successful console out there that is based on SteamOS. Just think about it, would Linux be dominating mobile market if it wasn't for Android/Google? No way, it would probably be even less than %0.1 worldwide.
So, just be thankful we have developers who are willing to release games for this sub 1% market. The good news is that many tools now (UE4/Unity5..etc) make it a lot easier for developers to release for Linux, and so no significant downtime is required to support extra platforms as it was before. As this trend continues, along with Vulkan becoming more stream, this should lead to more games getting released on Linux as a by-product of these technologies maturing.
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no_information_here Jan 9, 2018
Quoting: rat2000Isn't the methodology the survey that we participate at random times? I think it just checks then the OS Steam is running on and that's it.No, just because you randomly fill out a survey doesn't mean you know what Valve is doing with it. In science, it would be laughed at until they submitted their methods to peer review.
The other thing is that it was designed as a hardware survey. I am sure that the Steam client reports the OS to Valve at each login. There is no need for a survey. If they wanted, Valve could show live OS stats just like they do for concurrent users.
As I said, we should just ignore this "random" survey garbage.
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