Valve's Steam Survey Numbers For October Just Point To More Inaccuracies

[betam4x]

I tried playing CSGO. It was laggy as hell and I immediately uninstalled it. PIng seemed to be OK (~40ms), FPS was also OK (>200), but it felt like there was a 0.3 seconds delay between my actions and the reaction of the game. It felt like I was in water. I couldn't win a single duel. No, thank you.

Really? I capped at 300 fps and 0.1% mins were well over 100 fps. 4K, 1080ti, Threadripper.

Marketshare percentages are bullshit. 100% of 1 person is...1 person. 0.01% of 20 million is 200,000.

200,000 sales of a $60 game is $12,000,000. Just glancing at the regular sale prices via price tracking sites tells me that a proper RDR2 Linux port would account for 15-20% of overall sales...for the entire game.

Joel over at the fun pumps tried the whole 'no marketshare' numbers game with me. I actually spent several hours JUST USING STEAM DATA and their own sale prices. I also pulled data sources from elsewhere and I discovered that 7 Days to Die has lost approximately 30% of all revenue due to not having working Linux support.

Every CEO/CTO/whatever uses percentages instead of useful statistics like...oh world population or the actually number of people running Linux or OS-X on the desktop (Apple is the single largest OEM out there by the way...by far. They beat the next 3 OEMs combined. Where is their game support?)

[deant]

I play games on linux EVERYDAY, i just do it using plain wine!

[Ardje]

What happened when you restarted Steam in your linux machine before even completing it in windows? Last time I did that I got to fill it in in Linux also... which I did and then canceled windows computer submission (where I don't play anyway).

What windows? The only reason windows would run on any of my computers is for reversed engineering a driver, and that was 18 years after I stopped looking at that crap.
This was an actual spontaneous hardware survey on linux.
I don't remember ever starting steam on windows. Purely since I had no official licenses until I got my win and win2. But installing windows on a win2 took a bite of 48+ hours of the less than 14 days I had to send back the $1000 device I bought if I couldn't get it to work on Linux. I also spend another 3 days on revving the .sys file, but then I decided to just use USBPCAP and a few days later, the DDJ SX3's debute on linux was on an odroid xu4, cause I had plenty and mixxx worked perfectly on a xu4 for years ;-).

Eh, but I digress...
My first time ever steam hardware survey. On linux. And the results were incorrect. Nice.

[deemon]

I actually got my first spontaneous hardware survey in my life. And it had to be on my WIN2. It did not even report the hardware correctly, like my touchscreen, which works fine, but it reported as "no touch screen".

What happened when you restarted Steam in your linux machine before even completing it in windows? Last time I did that I got to fill it in in Linux also... which I did and then canceled windows computer submission (where I don't play anyway).

[Ardje]

I actually got my first spontaneous hardware survey in my life. And it had to be on my WIN2. It did not even report the hardware correctly, like my touchscreen, which works fine, but it reported as "no touch screen".

[deemon]

This month is another clear example of why rushing to report it isn't ideal. Phoronix said:

Valve have already revised it to say it's 0.83% (0.00% change not the +0.03% Phoronix stated), meaning it's the same as last month and they may well update it again in the next few days.

If you select from the drop down menu "Linux Only" ( https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux ) you see better the only linux numbers, so there has been some little movement.

Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS 64 bit	20.70%	+1.10%
Ubuntu 19.04 64 bit	11.19%	+0.34%
"Arch Linux" 64 bit	10.64%	-0.01%
"Manjaro Linux" 64 bit	9.99%	+0.35%
Other	47.48%	-1.78%

Which sadly in grand picture is still +0.00% for Linux this month. I really wish they tried better to de-tangle the "Other", to what it actually might be.

[aht0]

I tried playing CSGO. It was laggy as hell and I immediately uninstalled it. PIng seemed to be OK (~40ms), FPS was also OK (>200), but it felt like there was a 0.3 seconds delay between my actions and the reaction of the game. It felt like I was in water. I couldn't win a single duel. No, thank you.

It's called "input lag" and yes, it's a bitch.

[Dukenukemx]

There are still too many games on Steam that need changes done to make games 100% compatible. Once Proton is good enough that nobody notices a difference between Windows and Linux then we can see some massive gains for users.

[Luke_Wolf]

Make him check out Apache NetBeans* which is fully a featured IDE. I've used if for all my C++ projects last 5+ years. Even the project settings dialogs are almost identical to VC++ (no learning curve), and has some very nice productivity features that MSVC doesn't have. Lightning fast code assistance (intellisense was always too late), great refactoring, superior search function (doesn't pollute results with external library code, or inside comments), scrollbar view-finder (for instant overview of code matches) etc etc.
Also great support from developers, had at least 3 bugs fixed within a few months after reporting! The only downside of Netbeans that you can't go back to MSVC; you'll miss these vital features.

* Since 8.2 there's been no standalone Netbeans C++ release installer, but you can still install the regular Netbeans (Java) and then install the official C++ plugin from within the IDE via plugin manager, which may be a bit confusing to newbies.

You're the first person I've heard of suggesting NetBeans, I'd mostly suggest KDevelop or QtCreator at this point due to the clang integration, or CLion if you're willing to pay for it.

On topic... it's nice to hear that Michael has finally realized that the numbers Valve posts are questionable rather than shouting from the rooftops that they're the most accurate thing ever.

[[email protected]]

The only thing that does not work for me is doom 2016 demo with proton.

Take that with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that this specific game used to not work because of Denuvo DRM. They removed it from the main game later on, but never from the demo.

You could try to use Steam's 2h/14d refund policy as a demo, if you wanted