Steam Play Proton is correctly tracking Linux sales, a statement from Valve

Recently we put up an article highlighting a possible issue with how Valve were counting Steam Play Proton sales, here's a full correction and more information.

In the previous article, it referenced a Reddit post and Valve's quick statement at the time that Steam Play Proton might not have listed Linux as the platform for a game sale. We also added an update to that article today, after speaking to a developer whose Windows-only title was purchased by myself (and others) as they had told us they saw no Linux sales which seemingly confirmed there was an issue.

As it turns out, the system is working correctly but there was a filtering issue.

Valve reached out today to GOL to issue this statement:

Hi Liam,

We've looked at the issue and don't believe there's a platform tracking problem.

On the reporting side, there are two different ways that partner track how their game is doing on Steam. There's a per-game summary page; that one gets updated fairly quickly. There's also a detailed monthly financial reports breaking down all the payments made to a publisher, with some amount of delay.

While Linux sales were tracked properly throughout, there was filtering in place that did not separate "Linux Units and Revenue" from "Total Units and Revenue" on the per-game summary page. This would only occur when an application was not launchable via Linux, and was purely a display issue. As can be noted by checking any of the previous monthly financial reports, these transactions were separated out into Windows/Mac/Linux for all applications (regardless of their supported platforms) at the time of payment. We have made a change to the summary page to also show Linux units when they exist for an application; I expect it should help reduce confusion around this situation.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention,
- Pierre-Loup

It's really great to see Valve keep on top of this, communicate with us on it and act so quickly to ensure there's no more confusion for developers going forward. Hopefully then, it means this issue can be put to rest and everyone gaming on Linux can continue enjoying whatever they like.

Confused on what Steam Play and Proton are? Be sure to check out our simple guide.

Update 26/02/20: I had a reply today from Valve to further clarify other sales. The Steam Desktop client takes the initial platform, then two weeks playtime to count. All others (Android, Browser) default to Windows and then two weeks playtime. So of you buy games outside of the Linux Steam client, ensure you're loading them up for a bit otherwise it's a Windows platform sale.