Seems the big Chinese surge on Steam is over - Steam Survey for April 2023

Valve has now released the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey for April 2023, and it shows that things have calmed down again.

I reported earlier last month, that the details they had for March 2023 looked really off. It showed a massive surge in Simplified Chinese as a language on Steam with it becoming top, along with Windows 10 surging up over Windows 11 as well. It was all a bit odd. Valve never issued any corrections though, or announced any issues with it at all.  

For April 2023, things have settled down again with Linux back to 1.32% (+0.48%), macOS back to 2.30% (+0.89%) and Windows at 96.38% (-1.37%). Languages changed dramatically again too with Simplified Chinese dropping back down to 25.03% (26.60%) so English being once again the top language used on Steam.

When filtering the April 2023 survey over to Linux here's the current most popular ways to game:

• SteamOS Holo 64 bit 22.77% +1.57%
• Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS 64 bit 10.84% +1.23%
• Arch Linux 64 bit 9.79% -0.57%
• Freedesktop.org SDK 22.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 7.61% +0.51%
• Manjaro Linux 64 bit 6.25% -0.70%
• Linux Mint 21.1 64 bit 4.97% +4.97%
• Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS 64 bit 3.86% +3.86%
• Other 33.90% -10.89%

So it's clear the Steam Deck is currently beating all other ways on Steam for playing games on Linux.

You can view the data over time on the GOL Steam Tracker.