Steam Linux Usage Saw A Notable Decline For June 2017

[johnc]

Even I don't game on Linux anymore.

[schmidtbag]

I got a survey today and haven't for a long time. However, Steam crashed 3 times when trying to complete it. It asked me to complete the survey each time but I don't know if it successfully submitted, since Steam also crashed when I clicked Finish. It almost never crashes for me otherwise. I wonder if this has something to do with the worse-than-usual results?

[dungeon]

So in by percentage comparison it seems more people game on Steam using Windows than there are users of Windows , while using MacOS gamers are halfed, on Linux even tripple less than there are users actually Sounds like potentional should be near what amount of people actually gaming per OS also, but for whatever reason of MacOS and Linux that isn't the case

These who complain on big images i posting are probably some in these other 2/3

There is no chance to big changes as Windows is at 91% out there, so it has most chance to be gamed anywhere... maybe we can only beat MacOS if they decide to shot into their own foot it seems

[illwieckz]

Guess why, I updated recently and it crashes on start when rebuilding font cache.

That, plus the fact it crashes because shipping useless wrong libstdc++ library… Honestly, which modern distro used by people wanting to run Steam does not provide libstdc++ by itself????

[axfelix]

It feels a little like the Linux gaming moment might be passing -- 2014 was a really ideal time period (easily the best for Linux gaming since, like, the winex/Loki era) in that Unity had just started widely supporting Linux builds of most titles, most new games still hadn't made the jump to next-gen engines and thus ran fine on Intel Mesa, Wine had reached near-100% compatibility with DX9 titles, and nobody wanted to use Windows 8.

Proportionally, there are a lot more DX11-or-bust games now than there were three years ago, Microsoft has rebuilt their reputation a little bit, and Linux Steam hasn't *greatly* improved from the first release of Big Picture etc. It's not just a Linux issue -- OSX support has declined almost as much -- but Valve's original push is looking somewhat short-lived and it's not clear what would reverse the trend again.

[atmartens]

We need absolute numbers. Did Linux's share go down because there are fewer Linux gamers, or because there are more non-Linux gamers? If Steam users are growing, then it's possible for there to be an increase in Windows, Mac and Linux userbases, yet their relative proportions can change to different degrees.

[RealNC]

Gaming on Linux? No thanks. Input lag, graphical anomalies, performance issues, stutter, broken alt+tab...

Why on earth would I keep subjecting myself to all that? A Wintendo license is not too expensive after all :-P

On every Linux conference you see the same old same old. Disk I/O, server workload, MySQL throughput, systemd... Nobody cares about video games on Linux. They're for children or silly Windows users

[humbug]

Title should say
"Steam Linux usage percentage saw a notable decline"

Because the way it's phrased makes it sound like Valve reported a drop in absolute numbers.
In the same period Mac OSX usage dropped by an even higher (slightly) percentage.

[humbug]

Given the recent Vega FE benchmarks, I really doubt VEGA is going to be a worthy 4k card for Linux users either. Sigh, bit of a shame. I'll just wait it out and see what develops over 2017 with AMD. If they drop out of the high end card market for good then I guess 1080Ti will be my only choice for 4k gaming. Not what I wanted.

Vega gaming drivers are not ready yet on windows. They are not fully functional. So the benchmarks are not worth much.
That's why AMD pushed the Frontier Edition first for non-gaming use cases.

[Dukenukemx]

If you look at it from a gamerz perspective it makes sense. While gaming on Linux is cool and all, you want all your games working on it. Windows offers this now, while Linux doesn't. Wine doesn't even having ways to make those games work as modern games make extensive use of DX11. Even if DX11 were to work in WIne, it would probably be a hit or a miss if the game ran perfectly. Forget about performance with Wine.

Until someone creates a way to play those games on Linux with nearly as good performance, Linux will never get the attention it needs. It's not like Valve has forced developers to port their games to Linux. At this point porting a game to Linux is just a way to get attention for your game. And usually done long after the game was relevant. If GTAV were to come out tomorrow, it would be of no help since people would have played the game on Windows long ago. New releases need to be on Linux at the same time as it's ported to Windows.