November marked 7 months of Linux rising on Steam & 5 months above 1%

I was actually surprised to get the Survey popup yesterday. So I immediately filled it and sent it. It was some time till I saw the survey last time.

We're still a while away from seeing how the Steam Deck will affect this, if at all, as it depends on how Valve will be tracking the number of SteamOS 3 devices. With their original SteamOS 2 that was for Steam Machines, it never seemed to be included.

As I understand it, it wasn't that they didn't include SteamOS devices in the survey, it was that they hadn't worked out how to provide the survey pop-up in Big Picture Mode. They'll have the unified UI framework with the Deck, so survey consent should be a solvable problem, and they do want the hardware survey results to be indicative of all the hardware that runs Steam.

last year:
!gaming marketshare

how things were in 2017:
!2017

prediction made on 2017 about the future:
!prediction

one thing that people must remember is:
we arent 1% of the gaming market, we are 1% of 23% of the gaming market.

i dont know how those statistics will count steam deck, but one thing is for sure, if we manage to steal away users who would purchase an switch to play on the go, nintendo take too long go relase switch 2 or switch 2 dont sell well, and most people dont install windows on ther deck, then we can get an significant part of the market, otherwise , our relevance in the market is lower than the margin for errors in those statistics whetever source you use.


Last edited by elmapul on 2 December 2021 at 11:34 am UTC

i dont know how those statistics will count steam deck, but one thing is for sure, if we manage to steal away users who would purchase an switch to play on the go, nintendo take too long go relase switch 2 or switch 2 dont sell well, and most people dont install windows on ther deck, then we can get an significant part of the market, otherwise , our relevance in the market is lower than the margin for errors in those statistics whetever source you use.

Well, being one percent of a 37 billion Dollar market is representing 370 million dollars - just as 0.23% of a 160 billion market is.

So I'm not sure it's helpful to put PC gaming and mobile "gaming" into the same pot (diagram). You could as well make a huge diagram including all digital entertainment, or all recreational activities, and have the Linux gaming market look even smaller. But the actual size is the same.

Well, being one percent of a 37 billion Dollar market is representing 370 million dollars - just as 0.23% of a 160 billion market is.

So I'm not sure it's helpful to put PC gaming and mobile "gaming" into the same pot (diagram). You could as well make a huge diagram including all digital entertainment, or all recreational activities, and have the Linux gaming market look even smaller. But the actual size is the same.

i understand your point, but its a bit too hard to isolate the variables here.

1)there are an intersection of publics,some people only play mobile games, the games we call "casual games" others play both "hardcore" and "casual games", the same gamer can play both types of games or just one of then.
some people quit playing on gameboy/3DS or never touched one because they think their phones are good enough, others think mobile games suck but know that handheld games are still good (no pay to win bullshit), some people play on their phones but play ports of console/pc games or games made with the same business models (no pay to win, gatcha etc), others play mobile games on their pc, its too hard to isolate then all, but i will agree that my division made little sense.

lets isolate mobile for a moment, usually the games that are made for pc and console are the same ones (Aside from exclusives)
so i can say:

console 45.2b + pc 36.9b , totally relevant industry: 82,1 b
then there is the margin of error for people playing mobile games on pc or "ports" on mobile, but on avarege they should cancel each one.

finally from those 36.9 b, we are 1% (about 369 millions) so we are 369 million out of an 82,1 billion industry.
so we are 0,449% not 0,23%


the question is: will stake holders care about us?

I think it's a good time for Valve to push the Steam on Chrome Os officially. There was a rumor about it long ago. With that and Steam Deck we may finally break the cycle.

Okay, we are small for sure. Linux share is %0.xx or %1.xx or perhaps %2.xx depending on where you look at. But we are stronger than ever. And we are growing. Normal, non-hacker, non-tinkerer are installing linux to their boxes and using it for gaming. And it works.
Instead of thinking about how small we are, we should look for ways to increase it. Especially in these times where we can make public linux usage a reality.

I think it's a good time for Valve to push the Steam on Chrome Os officially.

Why do you think that ChromeOS support will help linux? ChromeOS is mostly used for education and managed by schools, which means that most users would not be able to install Steam if it was officially available. Also someone who really wants to play on a Chromebook would install Linux (or Windows) right away.

370 million dollars may sound like a lot, but its not, the cost of production of an modern game can go easy to something like 200~250 millions, and those companies dont make games for margins of profit lower than 20%.
not to mention that the money dont belong to a single person who might be an good person that believes in linux/free software and want to see it suceeed, it belong to a bunch of stake holders so its very unlikely we can convince all of the parties involved to support us.

steam deck is our best argument.

anyway

since a lot of people have some brand loyality, i think we can see the console market by the generations that still sell new games nowadays, ps vita wont relase any new game :
https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2021/07/20/ps-vita-last-releases-new-games/



Nintendo has: 3ds 75.95m + switch 94.5m ( 170, 45m)
Sony has: playstation 4 116.7m + playstation 5 14,9m (131,6m)
Microsoft has: xbox 1 50.5m + xseries 9.20 (59,7 m )

the users from 3DS are migrating to switch, users from PS4 migrating to PS5, and xbox one to x series, of course there are exceptions, some people chose an different vendor each gen, some have more than one platform.
the point i'm trying to make is that thos 45.2 billions will be split across those 3 platforms unless valve can take an slice of it to increase their own.

this should give us an general notion of how many units an steam deck must sell before linux became relevant...
now we need to see how many people are still purchasing games on platforms from the last gen how many did the switch completely to only buy on new gen (its easier to especulate that for playstation and xbox than switch)

I was actually surprised to get the Survey popup yesterday. So I immediately filled it and sent it. It was some time till I saw the survey last time.

I actually got it on *both* my machines last month, so that's one for Pop OS, and one for Elementary OS...

It's been at least two years since I had the popup on my main gaming machine, but within the last two weeks I've had it pop up on two of my other machines (with significantly lower specs).

370 million dollars may sound like a lot, but its not, the cost of production of an modern game can go easy to something like 200~250 millions, and those companies dont make games for margins of profit lower than 20%.
not to mention that the money dont belong to a single person who might be an good person that believes in linux/free software and want to see it suceeed, it belong to a bunch of stake holders so its very unlikely we can convince all of the parties involved to support us.

For big budget games, around half the cost goes on marketing (so platform doesn't matter). The biggest chunk of the remainder goes on asset creation - models, textures, motion capture, voice recording, scripts, and so on (where platform doesn't matter). The next biggest chunk goes on the game engine, with particular emphasis on the rendering loop since it's so critical to performance. Platform doesn't inherently matter here, but some platforms have poor support for some rendering APIs. The part where it really matters which platform you're on - your compile target, how you handle files, how you handle input - is a really tiny part of it. If you're not using a platform-specific engine, then adding another platform is cheap.

What isn't cheap, and what scares people away from new platforms (other than simply being bribed for exclusivity), is testing and support costs. It needs to be clear that those costs are going to be significantly lower than the additional revenue that they'll get from the new platform, and that they couldn't make as much extra money by doing something else (like adding new languages).

370 million dollars may sound like a lot, but its not, the cost of production of an modern game can go easy to something like 200~250 millions, and those companies dont make games for margins of profit lower than 20%.
not to mention that the money dont belong to a single person who might be an good person that believes in linux/free software and want to see it suceeed, it belong to a bunch of stake holders so its very unlikely we can convince all of the parties involved to support us.

For big budget games, around half the cost goes on marketing (so platform doesn't matter). The biggest chunk of the remainder goes on asset creation - models, textures, motion capture, voice recording, scripts, and so on (where platform doesn't matter). The next biggest chunk goes on the game engine, with particular emphasis on the rendering loop since it's so critical to performance. Platform doesn't inherently matter here, but some platforms have poor support for some rendering APIs. The part where it really matters which platform you're on - your compile target, how you handle files, how you handle input - is a really tiny part of it. If you're not using a platform-specific engine, then adding another platform is cheap.

What isn't cheap, and what scares people away from new platforms (other than simply being bribed for exclusivity), is testing and support costs. It needs to be clear that those costs are going to be significantly lower than the additional revenue that they'll get from the new platform, and that they couldn't make as much extra money by doing something else (like adding new languages).

It's sad to see that most of the big companies are giving more money to marketing than actual development. I understand that you need marketing so the market is aware of the product, but the product itself should have some quality and not only good advertisement.

I would say that if they spent less on marketing and more on making the actual game, it will be much better for their revenues. But I didn't saw any actual numbers, so it's just my opinion.

It's sad to see that most of the big companies are giving more money to marketing than actual development. I understand that you need marketing so the market is aware of the product, but the product itself should have some quality and not only good advertisement.

I would say that if they spent less on marketing and more on making the actual game, it will be much better for their revenues. But I didn't saw any actual numbers, so it's just my opinion.

Sadly the data does show that good marketing leads to good sales, and that good games don't necessarily lead to good sales. There's quite a big analytics industry that's looked at it.

370 million dollars may sound like a lot, but its not, the cost of production of an modern game can go easy to something like 200~250 millions, and those companies dont make games for margins of profit lower than 20%.
not to mention that the money dont belong to a single person who might be an good person that believes in linux/free software and want to see it suceeed, it belong to a bunch of stake holders so its very unlikely we can convince all of the parties involved to support us.

For big budget games, around half the cost goes on marketing (so platform doesn't matter). The biggest chunk of the remainder goes on asset creation - models, textures, motion capture, voice recording, scripts, and so on (where platform doesn't matter). The next biggest chunk goes on the game engine, with particular emphasis on the rendering loop since it's so critical to performance. Platform doesn't inherently matter here, but some platforms have poor support for some rendering APIs. The part where it really matters which platform you're on - your compile target, how you handle files, how you handle input - is a really tiny part of it. If you're not using a platform-specific engine, then adding another platform is cheap.

What isn't cheap, and what scares people away from new platforms (other than simply being bribed for exclusivity), is testing and support costs. It needs to be clear that those costs are going to be significantly lower than the additional revenue that they'll get from the new platform, and that they couldn't make as much extra money by doing something else (like adding new languages).

This is why it was such a huge win back in the day when engines like Unity added Linux support.
Not that the AAA are going to be using Unity, but in the lower tiers I wouldn't be surprised if we owe a lot of Linux native games to that.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 2 December 2021 at 5:10 pm UTC

But we are stronger than ever. And we are growing.

sigh.
any sucessfull gaming platform grow faster, an sucessfull platform grown from 0 to 40 millions~ 157 millions in an space of just 5~10 years.

we are at ~15 millions of users and we have been like this for almost 25 years!
(and not all of then are gamers)
those small changes in marketshare are caused by facors like staticstic errors or chinese gamers moving into or out of steam, not by people installing in masses an platform or purchasing linux machines.

Well, let's not lose hope. Last month I commented that if the rate of increase continued at a compounding rate, the exponential growth would lead us to world domination in ~9 years or something.
And today I'd like to note that if the rate of increase we saw over the last 9 months were to continue arithmetically, adding that same amount reliably every 9 months on average, we'd be at nearly 50% in only 100 years!


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 2 December 2021 at 5:38 pm UTC

Judging by the look of that graph, we might need to stop fitting just a straight line pretty soon. At least a second-order polynomial.

370 million dollars may sound like a lot, but its not, the cost of production of an modern game can go easy to something like 200~250 millions

A modern AAA game, sure. I doubt most indie games (of which there are vastly more than AAA games) cost more than a few million to develop, at most. I see this a lot, that people conflate "modern game" == "AAA game", and it bugs me no end. There are tons of modern indie games that came out this year.

A modern AAA game, sure. I doubt most indie games (of which there are vastly more than AAA games) cost more than a few million to develop

omg i say the words AAA and Triple A or blockbuster all the freaking time, i cant believe i forgot right now.
on the other hand, people always complain when i use those terms.

It's sad to see that most of the big companies are giving more money to marketing than actual development. I understand that you need marketing so the market is aware of the product, but the product itself should have some quality and not only good advertisement.

actually, many games are expensive to make too, i forgot to mention that about 75% of the budget is marketing, in the case of GTA5 it was 100 millions but only because at the scale they did their marketing it was impossible to put more money into it than they already put. (i mean, if some one didnt purchased the game already with their marketing than this person would not buy for any reason no matter how many ads they see)
that said, i think many companies already invest in their game as much as they can, puting more people at the project would not translate into more quality, i would just make the management more of an hell than it already is, i think the reason why a lot of games launched with tons of bugs has more to do with poor management than not puting enough money into it.
there are exceptions of course, nintendo games dont seem to be the type of game with an huge cost of production, they make simpler graphics but with a gameplay that is very polished instead of focusing on cuting edge graphics, they can invest more than they do but dont.
and gamefreak is lazy as hell, they can put a LOT more effort into their games.
i cant comment in many individual cases, i didnt played much in the last 10 years.