Quoting: MayeulCNot really. Accounts are selected randomly for the steam survey. If you are, a popup will appear on all of your devices. You'll be counted only one time, I'm not sure on which device. I usually try to answer on my main gaming rig.

Nope. My desktop gets surveyed in May and my laptop gets surveyed in August.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyOK, just near-instinctive reaction, haven't crunched recent numbers, but . . . if more than a million have shipped, shouldn't that have had a bigger impact on the Steam hardware survey? I thought the existing Linux user base on Steam was just over a million before the Deck. So like, shouldn't the Deck have pretty much doubled our numbers, shoving us up to the 2% range, rather than just nudging us up to 1.23?

It's fuzzy numbers. We don't know total numbers at all. The data we have are for Monthly Active Users - the number of unique users that have signed into Steam in a particular month - and we don't know if that was the peak for all months in 2021, or just in December 2021, or just in February 2022. But during at least one month prior to March 2022, 132 M users logged into Steam.

The number of active users is obviously counting users, and the hardware survey is only interested in hardware; if I happen to get the survey on both a desktop and a Deck in a particular month (I haven't had the survey on my Deck in the 2½ months I've had it, btw) then I'll get counted twice in the hardware survey (because that's two pieces of hardware) but I'll only count as one active user (because there's only one of me). The back-of-the-envelope estimate on the Steam Tracker page assumes that every piece of hardware tallied represents one user, because to do otherwise leads to insanity, but it's not strictly accurate: just the best we can do.

To give some estimate of how huge Steam is, in each month of 2021, 2.6 M people bought their very first Steam game.

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Quoting: elmapulim not worried about the lack of games, but i want to see more developers supporting it nativelly and more app developers starting caring about it.

You've got no users, so you don't get games, so you don't get users. That's where the failed consoles sit (and, realistically, where native Linux gaming sits without something radical like widespread hardware coming with Linux pre-installed), which is why selling huge numbers is so critical for consoles. Valve have sidestepped that by making as much as humanly possible of the existing and future library of Windows games, which will be made regardless, work on their Linux PC, so they don't need to achieve the critical mass that consoles need. The Deck needs to achieve two things to be a success from Valve's perspective (bearing in mind that they also don't particularly need to make money from it like console makers do: if people are buying PC games to play on their Deck, or buying PC games to play on their desktop or laptop, Valve gets the money regardless): it needs to let their customers know that Linux is a viable gaming platform, and it needs to persuade game developers that Linux is a valuable enough target that they test their games on Linux. Not necessarily make their games for Linux: Valve don't have to care whether a game is native or running through Proton. Customers like you and I might care, and, once they're already testing, developers might care, but Valve don't need to; as long as their Windows-using customers can still be customers without Windows, that's the important thing for them. Selling 100 M units would be nice, sure, but it's not essential to Valve's survival like it would be for a console maker, or like having a viable alternative to Windows is for Valve.

Quoteotherwise, microsoft entering the umpc market could reverse this trend, or maybe xcloud.

Well, both. An Xbox-branded handheld, and (especially ActiBlizzard) games locked into the Windows Store, with gamers already conditioned to having a Microsoft account (from Windows and Minecraft) and a Microsoft subscription (from Game Pass) would be a potent threat for Valve. Microsoft managed to get developers hooked on DirectX with their huge sums of money sunk into Xbox, and Valve have neutralised that, but they're not out of the woods. Whether Microsoft would eventually get smacked by regulators or not, Valve would have still taken the damage. That's why they need their customers to know that they can be Steam users that don't use Windows rather than Windows users that don't use Steam.

Quotedont get me wrong, things are looking nice, we already have more games than most consoles.
more than all sega consoles combined, and more than xbox series, wich has retro compatibility with other xbox generations.
more games than any nintendo console, and more than a lot of playstations. (im counting only verified+playable not even mentioning untested games, unsuported ones that do work, games outside of steam or emulators)
but the public dont have this perception yet, things are still reversible, lets not forget that we used to have native support for some triple a games recently and lose it, not get updates for the games, have updates from the OS breaking the game and the port houses no longer being able to distribute/fix it , among other issues.
i hope we can keep the current momentum forever, i will feel more calm when our install base grow large enough to prove its here to stay.

Yep. More market share is the only thing that can keep us safe: when we're too big of a market to ignore. But all the Deck users that are saying "I didn't know Linux was this good," the developers that are proud of getting their green tick, and the climb on the marketshare graph are all promising signs.

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Quoting: elmapuli know he said over 1 million and not 1 million, but that isnt impressive if we compare to any other console.

Consoles need to shift enough units to convince developers to make games for that console. The Deck doesn't need that: game developers already make games for the PC.

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Quoting: mr-victoryI stopped caring because seriously, we are talking about %0.0x changes overall. Notify me when changes are %0.1x

March-April was a 0.14 rise. But, yeah, in general that's what the trend line is for: to see the signal amongst the noise.

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Quoting: no_information_hereAs I have been complaining forever, Valve could easily take the data from live Steam client connections. They really have daily information of the base OS for every single user. It wouldn't have the hardware detail, but the OS statistics would be a 100% sample of logged-in users. Not sure why they don't.

Valve know what OS each customer is using. Sharing that information with third parties without specific consent is a privacy violation.

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Quoting: CyborgZetaInteresting that Ubuntu's back in 2nd place, and both Ubuntu 20.04 and Linux Mint have disappeared entirely.

Ubuntu was in first place last month. SteamOS has now overtaken it by virtue of shipping a shedload of units. Ubuntu 20.04 has dropped as people have upgraded to 22.04, and now both that and Mint are low enough proportions that they're in that huge 43% Other.

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This month I've still been working through my backlog of point & click games: Darkside Detective, Lair of the Clockwork God, Technobabylon, Voodoo Detective, and now just started Unforeseen Incidents. I also finished Dust and Limbo, and my little one finished A Short Hike. I've started Cloudpunk, A Plague Tale, Mad Max, Scarlet Nexus, and BallisticNG, and did some more Dead Cells. Now that streaming from a Linux host started working again with a recent beta I've also done a bit of Death Stranding streamed from my desktop.

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Quoting: GrifterI wonder how many games were actually ported to linux for stadia, and how many were simply protoning the windows version.

They were all ported to Linux: Google only allowed a Wine solution when Stadia was already dead. At least a couple used DXVK, though.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: StoneColdSpiderThe trailer is just 1 and a half minutes of "What the f*@k?"

I didn't find it so. What do you want, they should give you the plot?

I think they're referring to the "distinct folk horror tone and grounding."

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