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

[phoronix]

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

Each month we look at the estimated Linux gaming marketshare based upon Valve's Steam Survey. Generally the reported Linux market-share on Steam is hovering around 1%, which a number of Linux enthusiasts claim is inaccurate and under-represented. Well, Unity's survey information is much the same and pegs the percentage of Linux users running games based upon Unity as much lower than 1%...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Unity-20163-Linux-Stats

[DarkFoss]

Hmm, 80+ Steam games, 60+ GOG games= Zero Unity engine games. I think I may have opted in for 2 or 3 free for psn member games though. Total Steam Surveys over the past 4 years...1

[schmidtbag]

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.

[RMSe17]

"Windows 8 at 0.7%, Windows 7 at 65.9%, Windows XP at 17.3%, Windows 10 "

Poor windows religious users, they do not know that there is something better. I will give a Debian Xfce live dvd to my aunt, she is suffering from slow boot and shutdown and win10 upgrade ads in her win7 laptop.

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.

[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.

[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.

[triangle]

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

[edoantonioco]

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

[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"

[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.