It's Official: Valve Releasing Steam, Source Engine For Linux!

[energyman]

oh great. You know that such behaviour is considered annoying at best?

[Svartalf]

[QUOTE=elanthis;163880]A little low, yes. Roughly 70% of the world's computer-using population plays games, Windows is still roughly 90% of the world's market share, and so you should figure over 60% of Windows users are gaming on their computers. If you assume that that gaming population is more heavily biased towards Windows (which is an incredibly logical assumption to make), then that figure is closer to 70% than 60%.[/qupte]

Why 60%?

1) Your supposition that there's more home users than business users is a flawed one.

2) There's nothing that says anything about the 70% figure being right to begin with, let alone your 60%.

This idea that "everyone uses a computer at work" is just ridiculous. People working in the vast majority of jobs do not have their own computer to use, or a computer at all. Office jobs are just a small fraction of the job market. These kinds of silly assumptions are just another example of how the people behind Linux and FOSS are utterly out of touch with the reality of what regular people do with or want of their computers. That whole lack of a marketing research department really is a huge weakness of the FOSS community. The uber-nerds who post on forums and mailing lists and IRC are not representative of the larger market. They're the loud minority, not the quiet majority.

1) If the bulk of the machines are home machines, why is it that Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others make the bulk of their revenues on BUSINESS machines and servers? It's quite a bit more accurate than you think. One of the OEM insiders I used to get info from (lost contact with him over the years...but he'd have had this right, knowing where he worked...and it's IN Texas... ) had stated years back that home/gamer use was what drove innovation within the industry and it was business sales that funded the bulk of things. So far, I've seen little to change that impression I got from him. Most of the computers in use are business machines- you may not see them on every desk, per se, but it doesn't change the quantities at all.

2) Why are you presuming 60% are gaming with their machines? The sales figures don't match up with that supposition. Of the claimed 90% market share (Do keep in mind, I've got roughly 6-10 machines Microsoft claims in their market share that ISN'T part of it...their figures are for shipped, not used- and doesn't get into pirated copies, or Linux/*BSD/Hackintosh use, etc.) the gold/platinum level sales only account for 3-4% of the total market segment. 60%? Not even close. I'd say maybe 20-30% max since each game won't sell to the entire segment- but not even 60%.

Simply put...you're not on the ball with the figures like you think you are. You think you've got ideas, but in the end, you're guessing like many others.

[miles]

Yes, that 60% figure is way out of base, unless you also include Farmville/Solitaire gamers, but those work also OK on Linux.

AAA games sell bigger numbers on each of recent gen consoles (whether it's XB360 or PS3) than PC, and even if you include piracy (which doesn't get into the equation when you're a publisher selecting a market, only previous sales decide if you're going to publish the sequel on a particular platform; then again XB360 piracy levels on torrent sites are reported to be as high as on PC) it doesn't add up when there's about as much PC sold every 3 month as the entire numbers of XBox360 plus PS3 sold since they were launched 3 to 4 years ago.

If you consider game sales (excluding free to play desktop games Linux already allows), the percentage of PC gamers compared to the whole PC installed base (hundreds of millions) is infinitesimal.

[devius]

If you consider game sales (excluding free to play desktop games Linux already allows), the percentage of PC gamers compared to the whole PC installed base (hundreds of millions) is infinitesimal.

That's something I always thought to be true as well. I usually just use the over 60% market share of PCs that only have integrated GPU. Nobody is going to buy Crysis or Bioshock if they don't have a standalone GPU to play it on. And not all standalone GPUs are meant for games and not all of them have the power to play the most recent games.
The point is, Steam on linux would probably have an impact on the number of linux users, but it wouldn't be a massive increase. It would mostly benefit Valve because they would certainly sell a few more games, that's for sure, as was proven by the recent Humble Bundles.

Ok, now enter those who say "No!! You're wrong!! I have 3 or 4 friends who would install ubuntu if steam was available for it!! You liar!! We need gamez!! Only games can save us!!!!"

[energyman]

sure, we need games.
My mother and sisters play games all the time! Card games, 'Wimmelbilder', puzzles...

Their friends too. They do not care about the amazing graphics in Stalker. Or would ever play that. But a system without a selection of 'Wimmelbilder'? No go.

[elanthis]

Why 60%?

Googled and researched figures from other companies.

1) Your supposition that there's more home users than business users is a flawed one.

Bullshit. The vast majority of people do not use a comptuer at all at all. Bus drivers, cafe workers, janitors, farmers, construction workers, retail clerks and stockboys, etc. etc. make up a huuuuuge percentage of the workforce. They do not use computers at work; if they have one at all, it's a shared machine used for a few very specific tasks once or twice a day.

1) If the bulk of the machines are home machines, why is it that Dell, HP, Lenovo, and others make the bulk of their revenues on BUSINESS machines and servers?

Higher profit margins in the business sector. Home PCs are sold for barely more than cost these days. Business machines are sold for higher prices for the same parts, and also generally come with support and service contracts for 24-hour service/replacement (that the business pays for even though they rarely use it).

I worked in a large government facility for almost 7 years. Trust me, thre's a huge difference between the business of selling business-PCs and what you get when you buy a home PC.

2) Why are you presuming 60% are gaming with their machines? The sales figures don't match up with that supposition. Of the claimed 90% market share (Do keep in mind, I've got roughly 6-10 machines Microsoft claims in their market share that ISN'T part of it...

Apparently you didn't read what I wrote. Those are NOT sales figures. They are figures that come from Internet browser statistics (your browser reports the OS). Sure, a tiny little handful of weirdos change their user-agent string in Linux to pretend to be Windows, but they are so small as to not count.

You think you've got ideas, but in the end, you're guessing like many others.

Ditto.

[deanjo]

Bullshit. The vast majority of people do not use a comptuer at all at all. Bus drivers, cafe workers, janitors, farmers, construction workers, retail clerks and stockboys, etc. etc.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on there cowboy, farmers, retail clerks and stock boys most assuredly use computers at work. Farmers do a ton of stuff on the computer for farm related work, machinery parts and purchases, accounting, market checks, etc. Retail clerks likewise use a point of sale system and unless that retailer happens to be a huge chain retailer chances are that POS runs on windows. Stockboys the same are usually using a inventory application that is usually windows based.

[Svartalf]

Googled and researched figures from other companies.

What other companies...

Bullshit. The vast majority of people do not use a comptuer at all at all. Bus drivers, cafe workers, janitors, farmers, construction workers, ...

Heh... I think deanjo did as good a job pointing out the errors in your line of thought there as I could have.

Higher profit margins in the business sector. Home PCs are sold for barely more than cost these days. Business machines are sold for higher prices for the same parts, and also generally come with support and service contracts for 24-hour service/replacement (that the business pays for even though they rarely use it).

No... Higher VOLUMES in the business sector. Those machines? There's no margins in them any more than the home ones- in fact, there's often less.

I worked in a large government facility for almost 7 years. Trust me, thre's a huge difference between the business of selling business-PCs and what you get when you buy a home PC.

Large government facility... And you base it off of that? Heh...

Apparently you didn't read what I wrote. Those are NOT sales figures. They are figures that come from Internet browser statistics (your browser reports the OS). Sure, a tiny little handful of weirdos change their user-agent string in Linux to pretend to be Windows, but they are so small as to not count.

Browser stats??? You're basing this off of BROWSER stats?

I think this conversation has taken a turn into the surreal.

Browser stats are worthless as a metric for anything of the nature we're discussing right now. This has been proven time and time again because only select sites pay to collect these sorts of metrics- and they're typically not anything that a Mac or Linux user would be visiting as a site in the large. Certainly nobody in any business other than the web one, looking at what sorts of numbers they're looking at for ad revenues, would be using those for any basis of a business decision.

[deanjo]

Heh... I think deanjo did as good a job pointing out the errors in your line of thought there as I could have.

As a part time farmer, I just couldn't let that one slip by unchecked. Farming is very computer dependent nowdays especially as the small family farm is disappearing in favor of the larger "mega-farm" operations.

[devius]

Basically computers are everywhere, and we just don't notice them anymore. Soon enough a self-aware artificial intelligence system will start turning the machines against us and the only chance for mankind is to send one of us back to the past to prevent....