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

[liam]

Not a good source.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

That is only from those who visited the w3c schools website, so that skews heavily techy, so Linux will be disproportionately represented.
The one I gave, OTOH, is gathered from around 30 000 sites, IIRC.
Still, that 4.5% really looks nice

[Remco]

That is only from those who visited the w3c schools website, so that skews heavily techy, so Linux will be disproportionately represented.
The one I gave, OTOH, is gathered from around 30 000 sites, IIRC.
Still, that 4.5% really looks nice

The W3C Schools stats are not particularly relevant to this topic, but they are quite interesting. If Linux can become dominant among the tech crowd, this will be a prelude to mass adoption. Tech people are often in the position of making decisions that affect thousands of users.

[V!NCENT]

There is Red Flag Linux for China, 32 something million custom KDE builds in Brazil and 700.000 something KDE builds elsewhere. Then there is about a lot of million Ubuntu installs, lot of million Fedora installs, few million SuSE&Co installs.

If you would sell five percent of these people games at $20 and assume that all of that is 100.000.000 home use Linux installs then;
100.000.000*0,05*20 = 100.000.000$
Assume you make 5% profit then;
100.000.000*0,05 = 5 million dollar profit.

No market, huh... ?

[ZedDB]

That is only from those who visited the w3c schools website, so that skews heavily techy, so Linux will be disproportionately represented.
The one I gave, OTOH, is gathered from around 30 000 sites, IIRC.
Still, that 4.5% really looks nice

What I wanted to point out that statistics isn't really that reliable :P
The one you linked for example seems to be mostly US based so you'll get a view how the usage is there. And as it doesn't include all US sites you can't really be sure if you miss a group of people.

[yotambien]

Tech people are often in the position of making decisions that affect thousands of users.

From time to time in these discussions this argument comes up, and I'm not buying it. I think it's more often used when arguing that providing OSS Linux drivers is wise of hardware vendors because that pleases tech dudes, who in return recommend those parts to their Windows friends...

What I wanted to point out that statistics isn't really that reliable :P

What you did was pointing to an obviously flawed piece of statistics (if applied outside the scope of the observations). Do you really conclude from it that all statistics are rubbish?

The one you linked for example seems to be mostly US based so you'll get a view how the usage is there. And as it doesn't include all US sites you can't really be sure if you miss a group of people.

Firstly, the OS usage in the US seems to me a far more interesting case than the OS usage of the visitors of...w3schools. Secondly, you don't need to include all the sites to have meaningful results, as you don't have to ask everybody what do they plan to vote to have an idea of the outcome of the elections. And thirdly, I didn't find information regarding where those thousands of sites tracked by w3counter are based in, or the demographics of their users. I would think it extends beyond the US to a good part of the english speaking world, but this is just a gut feeling.

[ZedDB]

yotambien, What http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php presents in most likely the average western joe. Not the average western gamer joe Nor does the w3school present that.
If you take a look at http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ you'll see that the results in web browser and OS differ by quite much. Windows 7 is the most used OS there. But on w3counter not even when windows 7 is combined with Vista does it have more users than XP.
So I don't think you can say that the w3counter gives a fair estimate of how many gamers there are out there using a specific OS.

However I'm not trying to say that it doesn't provide a good estimate in other areas.

[yotambien]

Ah, I see. I was thinking about the most general case, not about the gamers niche.

On the other hand, I would think the current figure of Linux gamers isn't very relevant-and I would assume it to be very low. The important thing would be to know the potential number of gamers that could be brought to this platform, not the ones using it right now. A bit like what I imagine Sony or Microsoft did when launched their consoles. Before that nobody was using them, for obvious reasons, so I guess they did their market research duties before embarking into what could be a horrible failure. For Linux the situation could be somewhat similar, in that there may be a good amount of people holding on their transition from Windows because of the lack of commercial games. Those are the numbers that count, if I'm making any sense.

[Julius]

Ah, I see. I was thinking about the most general case, not about the gamers niche.

On the other hand, I would think the current figure of Linux gamers isn't very relevant-and I would assume it to be very low. The important thing would be to know the potential number of gamers that could be brought to this platform, not the ones using it right now. A bit like what I imagine Sony or Microsoft did when launched their consoles. Before that nobody was using them, for obvious reasons, so I guess they did their market research duties before embarking into what could be a horrible failure. For Linux the situation could be somewhat similar, in that there may be a good amount of people holding on their transition from Windows because of the lack of commercial games. Those are the numbers that count, if I'm making any sense.

Yes , but if you are not selling Linux, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from catering to that demographic (Unless they are actually not buying a game because they are thinking about switching to Linux and don't want another reason not to switch).
It's not like you have to pay some license fee to release your game on Windows

Thus all that makes sense it to cater to the existing Linux users (or those that have already decided to switch), and it can make sense to cater to a niche market if you expect it to grow in the long run, and by supporting them early you get a lot of loyal customers.
A big player like valve has little reason to do so however.

[Naib]

Valve has taken a Left 4 Dead-style shotgun to rumours that it is working on a Linux compatible version of its Steam platform.

The studio is opening Steam up in terms of formats this year - promoting Steamworks on PS3 and transferring the service to Mac.

However, the firm has quashed any suggestion that it may be looking at another windows rival.

When asked if it was working on a Linux version of the digital game sales platform, Valve's Doug Lombardi told GI.biz:

"There's no Linux version that we're working on right now."

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=261191

[Remco]

Yes , but if you are not selling Linux, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from catering to that demographic (Unless they are actually not buying a game because they are thinking about switching to Linux and don't want another reason not to switch).
It's not like you have to pay some license fee to release your game on Windows

Thus all that makes sense it to cater to the existing Linux users (or those that have already decided to switch), and it can make sense to cater to a niche market if you expect it to grow in the long run, and by supporting them early you get a lot of loyal customers.
A big player like valve has little reason to do so however.

It would still make sense to consider a possible move to Linux in strategic decisions. Valve will not be the only factor in Linux adoption. At the moment, it isn't any factor. If Linux starts to grow exponentially for some reason, Valve will want to be the leading game company on that platform.