Linux Usage Rose By A Tiny Amount On Steam Last Month

[jo-erlend]

It takes time for news to catch on

I've had a Steam account since they opened the beta, but there weren't many games that was interesting to me, so I kind of forgot about the whole thing. It was a serious Wow Experience when I read the post about there being more than a thousand games in Steam for Linux the other day.

A lot of people simply don't know it exists yet. But they will.

[Maxjen]

I want to be wrong, but I see this as dead in the water. If Valve is really serious about this, they would be putting tens of millions of dollars into improving Nvidia and AMD drivers for Linux and updating Mesa to the latest OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards, and maybe even paying companies like Blizzard and Electronic Arts outright to port their flagship titles to Linux.

They are doing this indirectly by supporting Vulkan which is better than OpenGL and will make driver development easier. And they are heavily investing into VR which will surely be a big thing and might help steam machines if they advertise them as VR ready.

[blackiwid]

I want to be wrong, but I see this as dead in the water. If Valve is really serious about this, they would be putting tens of millions of dollars into improving Nvidia and AMD drivers for Linux and updating Mesa to the latest OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards, and maybe even paying companies like Blizzard and Electronic Arts outright to port their flagship titles to Linux.

the nvidia drivers are good enough and on release the free drivers are not ready for the masses for some geeks yes and they get nice improvements over the weeks but forget about that for now. 90% works over nvidia I dont like that that much but ok its that way.

But lets see how consoles got marteted lets start with the old wii a big success why the controller + ONE FUCKING NEW GAME Wii sports. ok it was exclusive that helped it but still on the hardware bases they won the console war for several years. Of course with that garbage hardware they could not deliver good games and every game was a exclusive expending special game because you could not port normal games to it. because it was so different.

there got sold bundels with the consoles all the time it will most likely even be different per country so they can market how it works best for the location.

But lets say it that way there are 2 gamer groups out there pc gamers and people that never installs oses and dont want to deal with a normal desktop ui into their living room for gaming. Konseleros. there are also casuals and hardcore gamers.

I dont know how good they will target the casual people. but many konseleros have also more than one console. and they are often not that price sensitive. When they marketing some games that will not come for their konsoles but the steam konsole with a very good control scheme with the new controller. they will not start to build a windows pc because its possible and they can play some old games they most likely played anyway on their normal konsoles already. they will buy this "maschines".

yes microsoft could counter that by bringing a windows living room edition pc thing. but they would attack their own xbox.

the steam deal is a bit like convertibles or tablets with keyboard dock you buy one and get both. thats has not to be for everybody but even if 90% hate it the other 10% are enough to have the share they need. also maybe they win they vr headset war. the old konsoles are to weak to power a vr google.

Are their risks, yes. If they do the different versions bad it can backfire. will they get fast 50% of the console or pc market? no but between not reaching 3% of the pc market after 5 years and not getting the dominant system is a big gap.

I think more about if they reach 30% after 5 years or not. they have at the beginning it a bit ruff for pc gamers because they have not that back compatibility but its very likely that after the machines release I think than 95-99% of all new steam games will launch directly for all plattforms and 100% of all steam AAA games. so 2/3 years after the release of steammaschine there is no reason to stay in windows.

People hate windows steam is a good example why was it so sucessful because installing and keeping software up to date in windows is pure hell. and many people ignore all games that are not availible through steam, because they dont want to strugle with this horrible installers.

so despite a few people that want to play the games they bought 5 years ago even the hardcore gamers will migrate. or if their old maschine is to old buy such thing. also the todays problems will get resolutions much faster when there are 10 times the gamers of today using linux for that task. the wine support for this older titles will improve also on a much faster state then today and it will most likely be better integrated into steam ui.

its like a domino stones thing. more users more developers, more users, more devolopers...

[dungeon]

Why are there so many 3GB, 5GB, and 7GB ram linux users? I know that there is nothing wrong with using that amount of ram, but it still weirds me out. Just ain't natural.

It is natural when you have an APU, to set as VRAM what you want. Shows the same on phoronix-test-suite too. It is one 4GB mem stick, but 3GB as RAM and 1GB as VRAM, example:

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1504020-DE-CURRENT2828

[Michael_S]

the nvidia drivers are good enough and on release the free drivers are not ready for the masses for some geeks yes and they get nice improvements over the weeks but forget about that for now. 90% works over nvidia I dont like that that much but ok its that way.

Good point. With the Nvidia proprietary driver - and only us Linux fans would care about using a proprietary driver - the driver situation is good enough.

But lets see how consoles got marteted lets start with the old wii a big success why the controller + ONE FUCKING NEW GAME Wii sports. ok it was exclusive that helped it but still on the hardware bases they won the console war for several years. Of course with that garbage hardware they could not deliver good games and every game was a exclusive expending special game because you could not port normal games to it. because it was so different.

But that was the king of consoles, Nintendo. Steam is well known for Windows games, but not a household name for consoles like Nintendo.

there got sold bundels with the consoles all the time it will most likely even be different per country so they can market how it works best for the location.

But lets say it that way there are 2 gamer groups out there pc gamers and people that never installs oses and dont want to deal with a normal desktop ui into their living room for gaming. Konseleros. there are also casuals and hardcore gamers.

I dont know how good they will target the casual people. but many konseleros have also more than one console. and they are often not that price sensitive. When they marketing some games that will not come for their konsoles but the steam konsole with a very good control scheme with the new controller. they will not start to build a windows pc because its possible and they can play some old games they most likely played anyway on their normal konsoles already. they will buy this "maschines".

yes microsoft could counter that by bringing a windows living room edition pc thing. but they would attack their own xbox.

Good point, again.

But I still think that if I were not that price sensitive and I bought a Steam Machine for the living room, no matter what Microsoft marketing did I would put Windows on it to access more games.

the steam deal is a bit like convertibles or tablets with keyboard dock you buy one and get both. thats has not to be for everybody but even if 90% hate it the other 10% are enough to have the share they need. also maybe they win they vr headset war. the old konsoles are to weak to power a vr google.

Are their risks, yes. If they do the different versions bad it can backfire. will they get fast 50% of the console or pc market? no but between not reaching 3% of the pc market after 5 years and not getting the dominant system is a big gap.

I think more about if they reach 30% after 5 years or not. they have at the beginning it a bit ruff for pc gamers because they have not that back compatibility but its very likely that after the machines release I think than 95-99% of all new steam games will launch directly for all plattforms and 100% of all steam AAA games. so 2/3 years after the release of steammaschine there is no reason to stay in windows.

People hate windows steam is a good example why was it so sucessful because installing and keeping software up to date in windows is pure hell. and many people ignore all games that are not availible through steam, because they dont want to strugle with this horrible installers.

so despite a few people that want to play the games they bought 5 years ago even the hardcore gamers will migrate. or if their old maschine is to old buy such thing. also the todays problems will get resolutions much faster when there are 10 times the gamers of today using linux for that task. the wine support for this older titles will improve also on a much faster state then today and it will most likely be better integrated into steam ui.

its like a domino stones thing. more users more developers, more users, more devolopers...

Again, good points. Maybe I am wrong.

[megamanx1978]

I disagree. I think even if SteamOS had a great reputation for ease of install and ease of use, most gamers would flock to Windows for the better game selection. I'm about two steps away from being a rabid GNU/Linux fanatic, I have my Free Software Foundation membership card, and I'm still tempted to put Windows on my home PC because of all of the games I'm missing. I suspect almost all of the SteamBox sales at launch will include a Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 license.

I want to be wrong. But I don't think I am. I would be shocked if Linux has 3% of Steam users in five years.

SteamOS and the Steam Controller ARE what make a computer a Steam Machine. If a computer comes with Windows instead of SteamOS it is not allowed to use the Steam Machine name or logo. Linux don't have nearly as many games as Windows YET but the number of Linux games is growing fast and includes some big AAA games. Right now Linux has over 1000 games. As the number of Linux games grows so will the Linux gamer userbase. Honestly I think it is likely for the Linux userbase to surpass the Mac userbase in less than 5 years becouse of Steam Machines and Ubuntu Phones.

[profoundWHALE]

Recently a very good game was released on Linux. There would have been a small spike from something like this as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrfkOwcXEUc

[Passso]

Mortal Kombat X, Call of Duty 97 (or whatever the latest version is), Forza Motorsports, Gran Turismo, Halo, Tekken, Disney Infinity, Elder Scrolls, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry, Destiny, Madden, Dragon Age, etc...

Congratulations ! You know and can write 100% of the "next-gen" games and it is only 1 line long.
All those consoles were out in 2013... and I do not even mention the average time to finish most of them, this is pathetic.

I bought one of those dumb super high tech pc-amd based console and now guess what... I am back to Steam on my TV because even the Linux version has more AAA titles.

[blackiwid]

But I still think that if I were not that price sensitive and I bought a Steam Machine for the living room, no matter what Microsoft marketing did I would put Windows on it to access more games.

I don't, yes at the momemt its to bad for me, too. but if the new game coverage would be much better I would switch. And I mean there are so many ways between this there is streaming as example.

If the streaming client would be opensource that would be a really big thing for me. But I know that most people do not care about open or free software, so for them the proprietary client is a really big thing. its more likely that somebody does that instead of dualboot.

if the current maybe 3% linux dualboot machines that are maybe lowend machines and laptops people can finaly remove windows because they can play wow or maybe leage of legend from the game server...

they can put a gaming server somewhere even for more then 1 person share it in a housohold use it on the office without getting noise and heat. and buy such 50 euro livingroom streaming client. that is really attraktive option even for the hardcore pc gamers and even if you are price sensitive it is. I would do that in a eyeblink if the client would be foss. that would also proxy away propriatary software as a side effekt


for valve its not that important I think they will sell their controllers they will sell some streaming clients. the system is just very flexible and neat at the same time. lets say you buy such a maschine and it gets to old you can reuse it later as streaming client. The value is just great. if they fix their prices did not understand how they told 1 year from release the system prices. I dont belive that will be the real release prices.

[Licaon]

We are the 1%, if the Steam stats did not convince you, then maybe this will: http://www.pornhub.com/insights/os-battle/ ( kinda SFW )