Two quick bits of Steam news to cover this wonderful Monday morning. As expected, Steam does still appear to be growing.
SteamDB made a Twitter post yesterday to note that the previous historic concurrent user count on Steam set back in January 2018 of 18,537,490 was smashed to a new record of 18,801,944 online. A huge number of people of course but plenty are likely to be bots. What's interesting, is that against the same previous record, this year there were less people actually in-game. In January 2018 there were around 7 million in-game while this year with the new concurrent record only about 6 million were in-game.
While we're on the subject of Steam, their monthly Hardware Survey went out again and it showed Linux had risen to 0.9%. Going by our dedicated Steam Tracker, that's the highest it's been for at least 16 months now.
All good news as Valve continue putting resources into improving Linux gaming through funding graphics driver improvements for AMD, the new Container system, funding DXVK+Wine development for Proton, this new Gamescope and likely more to come still. We still need to find out what Steam Cloud Gaming is (#1, #2) which could see a reveal later this year perhaps.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
As people keep reporting this behaviour, I wonder if they're just using older survey data from people who didn't change their system...
Last edited by Eike on 3 Feb 2020 at 9:46 am UTC
Linux had risen to 0.9%
... is this our Windows 7 harvest? ;)
(No, probably just China coughing. (*) )
(*) Erm, no pun intended. Really.
Last edited by Eike on 3 Feb 2020 at 10:56 am UTC
rustybroomhandle 3 Feb 2020
--edit--
Just for the public interest: I had no survey in this time - not on my TV nor on my Desktop
Last edited by logge on 4 Feb 2020 at 4:47 am UTC
SystemShock 3 Feb 2020
no_information_here 3 Feb 2020
Valve has perfect realtime data of the operating system of every Steam user in the world. Just like a browser. They don't need a stupid inconsistent survey to achieve that. I still don't understand why they pretend they have any accuracy with this current sampling method.
So, what are the 12.5 million doing? Sifting through the morass trying to find a game to play? Or is it, if you have your Steam client open, you are a concurrent user?
Yes
This is a hardware survey, it means almost nothing for OS usage.And what does the hardware do? Run an operating system.
It's accurate enough most of the time.
Surely no coincidence with the decrease of Chinese users ;)
Last edited by jens on 3 Feb 2020 at 7:31 pm UTC
orochi_kyo 3 Feb 2020
"A huge number of people of course but plenty are likely to be bots."
It is like saying
"On communism, there is food for everyone"
"Sadly most of the food is rotten"
This is pretty much your opinion Liam, unless you have some source you chose not to share with us.
I just don't get this contradiction.
"As expected, Steam does still appear to be growing."It is growing, we know it is. Every time Valve report on it, the number of active purchasing users has increased.
"A huge number of people of course but plenty are likely to be bots."
It is like saying
"On communism, there is food for everyone"
"Sadly most of the food is rotten"
This is pretty much your opinion Liam, unless you have some source you chose not to share with us.
I just don't get this contradiction.
I said a huge number of people, plenty of bots. Just making a point that there will be bots amongst it. I did not say most of them or all of them are bots, there is no contradiction in what I said at all.
Last edited by Liam Dawe on 3 Feb 2020 at 8:50 pm UTC
I also got the survey on Saturday. My system hasn't change in a long time.Me too. This is getting weird.
Nice to see that the Linux numbers seem to normalize.Yeah, noticed that. Still, even with that decline the total Steam numbers seem to be rising anyway, so some of that rise has to be new Linux users.
Surely no coincidence with the decrease of Chinese users ;)
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