Steam Linux Usage Went Up A Tiny Amount In September, Still Less Than 1%

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Steam Linux Usage Went Up A Tiny Amount In September, Still Less Than 1%

While more games continue to be ported over to Linux and offered on Steam, the overall Linux gaming market-share remains under 1%...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-September-2015

[tegs]

Is there a way to manually submit a survey in the Steam client? I get the popup every once in a while on Windows but never on Linux.

[dh04000]

Is there a way to manually submit a survey in the Steam client? I get the popup every once in a while on Windows but never on Linux.

People in this forum need a lesson in statistics.

[Ardje]

Yay! I just left the steam client open all september... Ok, it's eating about 120W+ to do that, but it works!

[DanielG]

"Steam Linux usage went up/down to x%" is misleading.

In the months it went "down" it could have been that the absolute Linux number really went up, but the number of Windows users (possibly partially through automatically created fake accounts to cheat in free to play games or spam or whatever?) grew faster.

So what would actually be interesting is the *absolute* number of Linux users over time, not the percentage.

[adakite]

"Steam Linux usage went up/down to x%" is missleading.

In the months it went "down" it could have been that the absolute Linux number really went up, but the number of Windows users (possibly partially through automatically created fake accounts to cheat in free to play games or spam or whatever?) grew faster.

So what would actually be interesting is the *absolute* number of Linux users over time, not the percentage.

+1000
This what I told twice (at least) Michael to report rather than "%", which are not that useful.

[DanielG]

Well, where would he get the absolute numbers?
AFAIK Valve only releases the percentages?

[johnc]

In the months it went "down" it could have been that the absolute Linux number really went up, but the number of Windows users (possibly partially through automatically created fake accounts to cheat in free to play games or spam or whatever?) grew faster.

It is true that there was a period there where a ton of fake accounts were being made. I think Valve tried to take some steps to crack down on it but I don't know how successful they were. They didn't seem to mind bragging about "75 million Steam accounts" or whatever though.

[schmidtbag]

Yay! I just left the steam client open all september... Ok, it's eating about 120W+ to do that, but it works!

...what works? You do realize you didn't contribute to the survey results by doing that, right?

[srkelley5]

Yes, the total amount of steam users should be included to give a better frame of reference for the 1%. When Steam hit linux, I think that there were barely more than 40 million users (steam for linux launched in February 2013, last solid number milestone was released the previous August: http://store.steampowered.com/news/8662/).

Now there are over 125 million users (http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=997985), that's a jump from ~400k to ~1.25 million users in 2.5 years. That's slower than Wii U and PS Vita growth, but it's set to surpass both in rate of growth with the release of Steam Machines.

Some people, like myself, don't actually use Steam on linux every month. I've only used it twice this year. Only a third of my games are available and my performance is poor (R9 270) when compared to Windows. About half of my games (steam, gog, humble, etc) can run very well on linux natively or with wine, but why bother with that when I can just natively play it and still have access to my entire library in Windows? Like Alien Isolation, The Witcher 3, Chip's Challenge, Alien Isolation and Life is Strange. Chip would probably fly through wine or has has some open source implementation by now, Alien Isolation will not run well on my hardware (when it's finally released), Witcher 3 and Life is Strange don't have native support and I don't want to run into any issues when playing either one.

Hell, I have to disable one of m R9 270's just to get stable usage when I boot into linux. Crossfire may not be super awesome, but I got both of these cards on good refurbished deals for less than $100 over a year ago. That was still cheaper than getting a single R9 280/285/290/295 or the Nvidia equivalent of those amd cards. The performance has definitely helped in the more challenging games on Windows,