Unity Stats Show Linux Gamers Are Well Below 1% Of Their Customer Base

[FLHerne]

17% for WinXP is surprising - that's much higher than the general marketshare, and wouldn't gamers generally have newer machines?

Can't imagine playing most Unity-based games on XP-era hardware.

Perhaps they have a lot of customers using Chinese internet cafes...

[schmidtbag]

So these spiggots do not respect privacy and have got spyware built-in. Okay, no unity-based games in my house.

I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.

[Kendji]

Hmm, so Linux overall market share being between 1.87-5.6% and Gamer market share being 0.4-1.0%, the question is, what does this represent, why is this so? Would be nice to se stats on how many dual-boot and of those how many are gamers and how many of those game on Linux.

I also read somewhere that the OS market share of developers where ~20% Linux, ~25% Mac and ~55% Windows. Suggesting that Linux as an gaming platform is more of an geek or Linux hardcore thing still.


Links:

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

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0

[carewolf]

What do you mean it is not opt-in? It is opt-in. I have for one always declined to opt in.

[BangoMopar]

is this counting all the unity games on only those than support the 3 PC OSs?

^ This. And I Tweeted that I agree. If every Unity game "phones home", well, the numbers are useless since most Unity games are not released for Linux...

[theriddick]

Using Steam will practically auto opt you in. Considering most these games don't run outside of that.

Its going to be a little while longer until Linux is at all NOT TERRIFYING for new comers!
The fact we have so many driver problems atm is a HUGE hurdle (not everyone has NVIDIA cards!). Plus almost everyone I have talked to about using Linux said that its too hard/complicated when things go wrong; the idea of even typing in a command terminal is scary for almost all people. I can't tell you how many times I have installed a video driver which failed on boot up presenting a black screen!

Unfortunately you 'almost' never experience that horror on Windows (recent NVIDIA driver was BSOD etc), which is why it will continue to be the main platform indefinitely. I do hope Linux starts getting above %1 gamer usage one day, perhaps when display drivers improve? perhaps when we are able to run Fallout4 under Wine at good FPS @ 4k LMAO...

[schmidtbag]

Its going to be a little while longer until Linux is at all NOT TERRIFYING for new comers!

Yeah, well that'll never happen. People hate change. That's why people tend to stick with whichever OS or desktop environment they were first introduced to. That's why people hate Windows 8 and newer. There are plenty of Linux distros that are more user-friendly than Windows or Mac but people will still be afraid of them, because they're different.

The fact we have so many driver problems atm is a HUGE hurdle (not everyone has NVIDIA cards!). Plus almost everyone I have talked to about using Linux said that its too hard/complicated when things go wrong; the idea of even typing in a command terminal is scary for almost all people. I can't tell you how many times I have installed a video driver which failed on boot up presenting a black screen!

Driver problems aren't that bad. Do things the way your distro prepped them and you'll be fine. If you download drivers independently of your distro, there's a good chance something will fail eventually.

Unfortunately you 'almost' never experience that horror on Windows (recent NVIDIA driver was BSOD etc), which is why it will continue to be the main platform indefinitely. I do hope Linux starts getting above %1 gamer usage one day, perhaps when display drivers improve? perhaps when we are able to run Fallout4 under Wine at good FPS @ 4k LMAO...

On Windows, you get other problems that break your system just as hard or just as frequently. They might not be driver problems, but problems that still get in your way. But when Windows fails, it fails hard, and it's very difficult to repair it. When it comes to reinstalling an OS, Windows tends to be far more tedious.

The problem is you're trying too hard to make linux be something it's not. It isn't Windows and it isn't a replacement to Windows. Wine should be avoided at all costs. I personally haven't used wine on my home PCs in about 7 years. I understand sometimes you might have some obscure program that only runs on Windows (such as any Adobe CS product) but the way I see it, wine should really only be used to help you transition away from Windows, but you should eventually ween off of it.

[theriddick]

That may be so, but I will tell you this, without manually setting the power states of my 390x under Linux with the standard package driver results in freezes and system restart problems. NOW that I understand the problem better I can easily resolve it, but it required a fair bit of tom foolery under terminal before X start to resolve that issue.

I still need to figure out howto make my own fan profile for the 390x (there have been ways but often they are outdated and no longer work). But honestly how hard would it be for a developer to 'get' a 390x or any other other cards that have these issues and just USE it for a while to understand these issues (I mean use it to game etc), then apply fixes.

I get the distinct feeling allot of AMD OSS driver team is exclusively testing with a 285 card or something....

schmidtbag I get told allot there is no problems with just using standard, but if I were to make a video of what happens when using 390x (think it happens for 290x and maybe non x versions also) from installing/using/gaming/steaming you'll be surprised!

[andre30correia]

i don't remember a single unity3d game, the plugin never was native (we need to use pipelight) i really think this huge numbers for their garbage

[schmidtbag]

@thereddick
I personally own an R9 290 and have been using the open source drivers for about a year and a half now, on either Debian or Arch. Everything has been very smooth for me. My xorg.conf is pretty basic. The worst experience I had was in the first month I had it, where power management wasn't fully functional yet and a couple games performed worse than my old HD5750. Today, it runs great. There are a few games with some questionable issues, but those problems can be linked to the game devs, not the drivers. There definitely is room for improvement in performance, but it seems every month the radeonSI drivers get a little bit faster.

Seems to me you have a hardware issue. You shouldn't need to control the fans at all. If they're too loud, you have bad ventilation in your tower or you made the mistake of getting a Gigabyte or OEM model with the reference cooler. If you are getting stability issues, that could be linked to your power supply. These are pretty power-hungry cards. If you have more than 2 PCIe power cords, try swapping one of them. Some PSUs are mistakenly designed with PCIe power cords put on the same rail.