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

[deanjo]

Svartalf, for a guy that keeps preaching how buying a windows game and then downloading a blob for linux doesn't count as a linux purchase I'm kind of surprised that you guys would fall into the same trap.

[b15hop]

I'd have to agree with Deanjo even though I haven't entirely read everything he's written. Just on the premise that Linux isn't as small as people would have you believe. That humble indie project did so damn well that it shocked me even. I know that the bean counting is done probably in favor of linux, but even then, 20% of donations is much higher than the 2% that MS would have you believe. For actual OS downloads, I'm sure it's between 20% and 5% which is not bad considering.

If you put in linux payment / windows payment. You get around

13.62 / 6.36
=
2.141

That means that there were around half as many Linux downloads more than likely.

9.33920707 % are linux users...

total users * user percentage

194227 * 0.0933920707

=

18139.2617

So probably 18139 linux users downloaded the game? I think that's a more accurate estimate. 9% is much better than the MS propaganda telling everyone that Linux is less than 1% of the market. Given that if there was a steam client with many Linux binary ports, I'm sure the number would be even higher...

Food for thought anyway, even if I'm totally wrong.

It would be a good risk if they actually release a Linux steam port that either works in conjunction with cedega / wine or even better, allows native downloads. How could they argue when in the end it would just be more money for them?

[b15hop]

This old ZNet article might shed some light on real figures.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/itfacts/linux-desktop-market-share-to-reach-6-in-2007/5334

6% (znet) to 9% (humble indie) seems accurate for me.

Also the Wiki entry might help show some more statistics on the whole scene.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems

@ Svartalf: I'm sure you have more info than me and my quick google searches? I'm not exactly the most clued up person in this topic.

[Naib]

You have to take into consideration the demography. While windows may have on average 85% of the market share, within certain groups there will be larger proportion of Linux users.
Take games... What % of all Windows machines are actually used to play games? the "windows have 85% market-share, why should game companies consider anything else) is meaningless without a breakdown of what % of that play games. VAST majority of that 85% will come from the corporate world and there won't be AAA games played on their (officially)

[elanthis]

VAST majority of that 85% will come from the corporate world and there won't be AAA games played on their (officially)

That's bass-ackwards. The question is, how many people who give a shit about games are using each OS?

Even if only 50% of people on Windows are gaming, if only 5% of people using Linux are gaming, then that 50% looks a lot bigger.

[Remco]

Even if only 50% of people on Windows are gaming

That's a *low* estimate??

[elanthis]

That's a *low* estimate??

A little low, yes. Roughly 70% of the world's computer-using population plays games, Windows is still roughly 90% of the world's market share, and so you should figure over 60% of Windows users are gaming on their computers. If you assume that that gaming population is more heavily biased towards Windows (which is an incredibly logical assumption to make), then that figure is closer to 70% than 60%.

This idea that "everyone uses a computer at work" is just ridiculous. People working in the vast majority of jobs do not have their own computer to use, or a computer at all. Office jobs are just a small fraction of the job market. These kinds of silly assumptions are just another example of how the people behind Linux and FOSS are utterly out of touch with the reality of what regular people do with or want of their computers. That whole lack of a marketing research department really is a huge weakness of the FOSS community. The uber-nerds who post on forums and mailing lists and IRC are not representative of the larger market. They're the loud minority, not the quiet majority.

[mirv]

A little low, yes. Roughly 70% of the world's computer-using population plays games, Windows is still roughly 90% of the world's market share, and so you should figure over 60% of Windows users are gaming on their computers. If you assume that that gaming population is more heavily biased towards Windows (which is an incredibly logical assumption to make), then that figure is closer to 70% than 60%.

This idea that "everyone uses a computer at work" is just ridiculous. People working in the vast majority of jobs do not have their own computer to use, or a computer at all. Office jobs are just a small fraction of the job market. These kinds of silly assumptions are just another example of how the people behind Linux and FOSS are utterly out of touch with the reality of what regular people do with or want of their computers. That whole lack of a marketing research department really is a huge weakness of the FOSS community. The uber-nerds who post on forums and mailing lists and IRC are not representative of the larger market. They're the loud minority, not the quiet majority.

Just to say, that there are a surprisingly large number of jobs where people use computers and you normally wouldn't think they do. They just don't use them for office work, but rather for more dedicated tasks - but they can still play the odd game on them.

[b15hop]

A little low, yes. Roughly 70% of the world's computer-using population plays games, Windows is still roughly 90% of the world's market share, and so you should figure over 60% of Windows users are gaming on their computers. If you assume that that gaming population is more heavily biased towards Windows (which is an incredibly logical assumption to make), then that figure is closer to 70% than 60%.

This idea that "everyone uses a computer at work" is just ridiculous. People working in the vast majority of jobs do not have their own computer to use, or a computer at all. Office jobs are just a small fraction of the job market. These kinds of silly assumptions are just another example of how the people behind Linux and FOSS are utterly out of touch with the reality of what regular people do with or want of their computers. That whole lack of a marketing research department really is a huge weakness of the FOSS community. The uber-nerds who post on forums and mailing lists and IRC are not representative of the larger market. They're the loud minority, not the quiet majority.

Well that is my point too. I think my 6 to 9 percent would fit quite nicely. Given that, there may well be more gamers on Windows than on Linux. Who knows? What if it's the other way around. I think the best thing that could happen, would be for steam to come out and prove us all wrong. Then we can see how many people really are using Linux. I'm sure that would be very valuable information to Valve. Given how many people play WoW, I think there would be a lot more ub3r nerds than people would come to know. Think how many Linux users would play games if they were available?

[neorazorx]

I made an online steam linux checking script. It checks steam linux url every 8 hours. When steam for linux were ready, this script will email to everyone who has made a comment.

http://www.ubufaq.com/steam4linux

PS: sorry for my bad english
PS2: source code here -> https://github.com/NeoRazorX/ubuntufaq