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

[carewolf]

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

[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

[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.

[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...

[SystemCrasher]

it's not a random opt-in survey like with Steam.

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

[vorador]

percentage without a total is misleading...

as someone else pointed out about steam, it's 1% linux from 100+ millions of users, so 1+ millions of linux users is not "a few linux users"

[edoantonioco]

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

[triangle]

Windows XP has over 2x as many unity gamers as Windows 10... wow

[ssokolow]

I don't understand how these statistics are gathered. I don't think each individual game submits this data. Unity is appealing to indie devs, and indie games are the most popular on linux, so something seems a bit off.

I'm guessing this survey data is collected only through the Unity developer tools, in which case these statistics would perfectly make sense. Many developers prioritize Windows first, and will probably only boot into Linux just to compile or test the game (assuming you can't compile for Linux in Windows). If it can compile without Linux, many devs may try compiling without ever testing it in linux.

I think I remember seeing people complaining that Unity games send an analytics ping to Unity Technologies on first-run and there's no way to opt out of it.

[schmidtbag]

Last time I checked, there was nothing better for gaming than Windows in all of the following categories: number of games playable, driver features, driver performance, and game performance.

* Number of games playable is irrelevant, because as long as Windows retains it's binary compatibility, it will always have more games than any other platform, including consoles.
* If you use the closed-source nvidia drivers, you get pretty much all the features you really need. There are a few here and there that are missing, but those tend to only apply to a few enthusiasts.
* Tests have shown that the closed-source nvidia drivers on linux have been able to out-perform Windows.