Steam Linux Usage Drops Lower... Below 0.9%

[Delgarde]

The client itself knows on what OS it's running, but it doesn't mean it's passing that information back to Valve without taking your permission first.

It might be, though... nothing sinister, but there's a good chance there's some kind of User Agent string, just like a browser would have.

[johnc]

GOG has a client of their own now. It's nice to see some competition in this area.

A lot of the big dev studios were hesitant to jump in to Linux with both feet, of course. They were wise to take a wait-and-see approach to the whole thing because as time went on, a lot of the hype tapered, and now -- all kidding aside -- Steam Machines and SteamOS are pretty much DOA. Valve, despite its many good intentions (?), is a company that just can't produce deliverables anymore. Consider that Gabe Newell once bragged about how an employee was writing 4,000 SLOCs per day in the HL1 era. Does Valve today even produce 4,000 SLOCs in half a year?

The biggest concern I see going forward is that all the game devs are talking DirectX 12 for the future. That means Linux isn't even on their radar and the status quo of second-rate ports should be expected for a long while.

[zanny]

Valve, despite its many good intentions (?), is a company that just can't produce deliverables anymore.

What?

DOTA2 is really good. Portal 2 was really good. CS: Go was really good.

At that, they have not released a game in a long time now, but they did just ship Source 2, and they have said they want to see that engine get industry adoption, so they probably put a lot of work into it. Steam in home streaming happened, and works, on everything. They added their own integrated online streaming too, which works as well.

They have obviously not put that kind of care into SteamOS yet, if ever. The installer is still a PITA, it still feels like a half assed pile of Debian packages thrown together on a weekend, and the first generation Steam Machines shown last year were atrocious, and the fact they won't do an official reference Steam Machine besides the Steam Link shows they probably don't care.

But don't say Valve can't make stuff anymore. Obviously as a developer they are incredibly lax, since they make so much free money from Steam. Its how they can do things like give all of DOTA2 away. But when they do release stuff it usually works and is pretty good, besides the honestly insane NIH syndrome they display. Their chat service is proprietary. Their h264 accelerated VNC is proprietary. Their online broadcasting is proprietary. None of their in-client groups support things like syndication or announcing through third party services. Thats my only real criticism though, not that they don't deliver anymore. SteamOS is the only blemish on their record, probably because they quickly realized they dove into a much larger war than they thought they were getting into at first, just porting their own games and seeing how easy it was.

[ltcommander.data]

Even if their sampling method is not fully representative of the whole population, they are under sampling Linux users or are always sampling the same people, doesn't that primarily affect the accuracy of the absolute numbers? As long as the methodology is consistent, which presumably it is, the trends could still be accurate even if the absolute numbers are not and the trend now seems consistently downward for Steam Linux usage.

[Kano]

I did not play a game for a while and just got the survey with my Intel only Linux box. I can not see any direct connection if you play games or just run the client, it seems to be random at login. Of course it you use more often Windows to play games it is more likely that it will show up there. An other interesting stat would be how many times Linux/OSX versions of popular games are executed compared to Windows, especially the free ones like Dota 2 and TF 2. CS:GO would be interesting as well, those are the top 3 games and also multiplatform.

[MrRtd]

I am Linux user who has never seen this survey.

[Soul_keeper]

I've been trying to convince linux users to play a video game with me for years now.
I've failed. The ones I know online tend to either have a windows gaming box, console, or just refuse to give me the satisfaction of playing "my game".
Also the gamers tend to favor the flavor of the week, which is almost certainly a windows game. They'll try something once, then never try it again.

Things are a lot different than I remember them 10-15yrs ago, when everyone I knew online would game over the weekends.

[Ancurio]

In which case, no need for any kind sampling.... Just publish the data....

Um, have you ever looked at Steam stats? It has all kinds of data, not just OS, but things like hardware / memory / internet speed. So yes, there is need for sampling.

The client itself knows on what OS it's running, but it doesn't mean it's passing that information back to Valve without taking your permission first.

Why wouldn't it? It's not probing your computer at all. Valve also doesn't ask you whether you want the amount of time you spend inside games tracked, it just does it.

[phio]

I don't remember seeing this survey in 5 years of using Steam for Windows. Few days ago, just after I finally decided to try it for Linux, it appeared on my screen. Does it mean that the actual usage of Linux is highly overestimated? I doubt.

I'm using low-end laptop with Optimus. Installing driver for Nvidia didn't work at Xubuntu 14.04 the way it is officially suggested (black screen, no response - Windows user is in PANIC because even if he knew the Ctrl+Alt+F combination it'd take him to black console world where people disappears for ages) and was a bit problematic for me (10+ years Linux desktop). Atfer that I found that I can't even run some of the Valve's Half Life series games using bumblebee (core dumped), but luckily nvidia-prime did the job. But, after all, I decided to play at Intel HD because the screen tearing was huge problem and it is currently not possible to fix it for my Nvidia. Luckily it was possible for Intel by modifing some text file. This is just too optimistic to expect an average Windows user to go through all the steps just to (not) play some Half Life game. It'd be even ridiculous doing that on high-end computer I'd invest a lot of cash in and resigning from so many good games at the same time. From my perspective using Linux for gaming is just pain in the ass, the more Windows gamers will give it a try at the current state the more will say "don't try it" to his/her friends and maybe this is one of the reasons that the share is going down too.

[Azrael5]

The only way to spread Linux systems is the pre-installation (because it overcomes the psychological threshold of the common user).