Steam On Linux Ended 2021 At 1.11% Marketshare

[Vistaus]

”

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS 64 bit	17.90%	+1.48%
"Manjaro Linux" 64 bit	11.96%	-0.98%
"Arch Linux" 64 bit	11.42%	-0.69%
Linux Mint 20.2 64 bit	7.50%	+0.46%
Ubuntu 21.10 64 bit	6.31%	+0.89%
Pop!_OS 21.04 64 bit	5.54%	-1.77%
Other	39.38%	+9.31%

Interesting.

Developers: “No one should target Arch for gaming as it's a rolling release with lots of breakage”
Meanwhile: *Arch and Manjaro combined have 22% Steam market share, scoring second only to Ubuntu and its derivatives combined (and that's even before the release of the new Arch-based SteamOS!)*

[birdie]

”

Interesting.

Developers: “No one should target Arch for gaming as it's a rolling release with lots of breakage”
Meanwhile: *Arch and Manjaro combined have 22% Steam market share, scoring second only to Ubuntu and its derivatives combined (and that's even before the release of the new Arch-based SteamOS!)*

Linux game developers don't target Arch or any other Linux distro, they target the Steam runtime which guarantees stable API/ABI. And then with the advent of Proton pretty much no one considers native Linux ports any longer - it makes very little sense when you can have the same binary for all platforms.

[Emmanuel Deloget]

No, it won't be interesting at all, it'll be just as boring as it has ever been in the past 8 years. New month, same low numbers, Linux fanboys with a complete lack of understanding of statistics and sampling cry wolf about statistical errors, then wait for next month. Rinse and repeat. That's Steam Linux numbers @ Phoronix in a nutshell for you.

We're talking about fractions of ONE percent. Over the course of 8 years. Anyone who gets excited about that has... problems.

Even if you are not interested in this (in which case I don't understand why you spend some of your valuable time to post an answer on this thread) the numbers are of interest to many others, including me.

According to Valve, there is between 20M and 28M concurrent players on steam each day, so a fraction of a percent (say 0.1%) is actually an impressive number of players (between 20K and 28K players). Having 1.10% of linux players means there is between 220K and about 310K active linux players each day.

Again according to Valve, 2020 saw 120M monthly active players (that was about 1.1M monthly linux players). The number was up from 2019 (95M monthly players, 0.82% market share -> less than 800K monthly linux players). A simple progression would mean that for 2021, the number of active linux gamers on steam is approchaing 1.5M.

So the number (and its tiny variations) is actually misleading. The number of linux gamers is increasing (+100% since 2019). This is actually a market which is of interest to publishers - not to develop specific ports, but at least to make sure that their game is correctly supported on proton (and perhaps to develop proton patches to make their games playable on linux). This is alreasy happening - some small developpers who tries to gain access to niche audiences are already listening to the linux community and fix bugs either in their game or in proton to make sure its works correctly on linux.

And that's a good sign for the future.

[Vistaus]

Linux game developers don't target Arch or any other Linux distro, they target the Steam runtime which guarantees stable API/ABI. And then with the advent of Proton pretty much no one considers native Linux ports any longer - it makes very little sense when you can have the same binary for all platforms.

I was talking about gaming in general, not just Steam.

[moilami]

No, it won't be interesting at all, it'll be just as boring as it has ever been in the past 8 years. New month, same low numbers, Linux fanboys with a complete lack of understanding of statistics and sampling cry wolf about statistical errors, then wait for next month. Rinse and repeat. That's Steam Linux numbers @ Phoronix in a nutshell for you.

We're talking about fractions of ONE percent. Over the course of 8 years. Anyone who gets excited about that has... problems.

I have had 8 good years, and it seems more is to come. I don't even think about installing Windows, and much less for gaming. I don't want all the games in the world, though I would not mind getting them. I want enough good games, and I have more than enough on Linux right now which I have bought. What I don't have is time to play them enough. That is the problem for me. So yeah, I am very excited, and yeah, I have a problem, namely lack of time.

[slalomsk8er]

I'm wondering how big the recent ban of Steam in China will impact the numbers. A very interesting time for the Steam on Linux marketshare numbers indeed!

[eriktorbjorn]

And then with the advent of Proton pretty much no one considers native Linux ports any longer

Gee, I hope that's not the case, because I've never gotten Proton to work at all. I'm guessing it requires a working Vulkan driver, or something like that. (Not that I'm in any danger of running out of games I've been meaning to look at. My backlog stretches back several decades...)

[birdie]

Gee, I hope that's not the case, because I've never gotten Proton to work at all. I'm guessing it requires a working Vulkan driver, or something like that. (Not that I'm in any danger of running out of games I've been meaning to look at. My backlog stretches back several decades...)

Proton/DXVK does indeed require a Vulkan driver. Sorry, mate, the world has moved on. If your GPU doesn't support Vulkan, you may as well not care about games at all.

[eriktorbjorn]

Proton/DXVK does indeed require a Vulkan driver. Sorry, mate, the world has moved on. If your GPU doesn't support Vulkan, you may as well not care about games at all.

There is experimental support, but I haven't bothered enabling it since I can only think of two or three Linux games that I care about that would require it, and probably a few dozen (some of them quite new) that don't. So the world hasn't moved on far enough yet for me to bother. At some point (which could be years from now), either Vulkan support will be declared stable or I will have gotten myself a new computer.

[finite9]

Moved to Linux fully in 2006, and basically had to give up gaming at that point. Eventually got an Xbox for my son in 2012 and sort of played some co-op with him through the years, but recently with the Proton >5.x support (and GOG/Wine), it's opened a whole new world of gaming for me on Linux, initially with some older games like Monkey Island 1&2 SE on Wine and Left For Dead 2/Quake Live/Micro Machines through Steam, then Dying Light and now Doom Eternal through Proton. With some GOG games like Day Of The Tentacle having native ports, and other native Linux games through the repositories, as well as Vice C64 (flatpack), FS_UAE Amiga and MAME emulators, I feel like for me, going on 50, this is a golden age of combined retro gaming and some modern AAA titles on Linux, and I couldn't be happier with the status as it is right now. If Proton support continues to improve with more titles being supported (my son plays all the CoD titles so it would be nice to co-op), then perhaps others who would rather see more AAA support, will also feel that Linux is now a solid alternative.

As for surveys, I've _never_ got one in all these years. Running the native version of Steam client, on Fedora 35, not through Wine.