Valve's Steam Survey Shows Linux Gaming Fall To One Of The Lowest Levels Ever

[wagaf]

Something to consider is that most users with SteamOS or Steam on Linux would also have Steam on Windows, thus pushing the percentage of linux machines even lower.

Those Windows installs are also counted in the survey, so the percentage of users using Steam on Linux is actually higher.

[haplo602]

We really need DRM-free sites like GOG and Humble Bundle Inc. to start generating ongoing, comprehensive (eg. not just "self-reported while paying for each bundle") stats from their Apache/Nginx/etc. logs for:

1. Downloads of Linux installers/archives
2. Downloads of Windows installers/archives performed by Linux user agents.

...then, we'd finally have some hard data on what bias "Freedom, not DRM!" may be introducing into Steam's Linux numbers.

Well yeah, this. I don't get their numbers when I see that there's no linux game in the bundle but there are still Linux sales reported. Ok, Wine is one reason but anyway, the % is too high in most cases.

Seeing a breakdown by platform downloaded would be much better.

[jbysmith]

Instead of these excuses as to why it's going nowhere, they should just have the Steam client report back what's connecting to their services, no survey, just hard numbers. It's not a deep dark secret, your browser does this every time. They're trying to push an alternative platform for their service and doing an abysmal job as to actually motivating people to do so. Development studios are going to look at this long trend of a non-existent market share and eventually wonder why they should even bother.

[johnc]

As a RHEL certified IT professional, I of course use RHEL and CentOS and Fedora at home. Why would I want to bother learning a completely different OS when my day job is managing RHEL servers? Unfortunately, Valve has decided that RHEL and CentOS and Fedora are for the community to support, and they don't want to bother with them. I run into a handful of games that simply don't launch on RHEL 7 but they work fine in Ubuntu. No, I haven't bothered to troubleshoot the issue, and quite frankly, I shouldn't have to - I'm a paying Valve customer. If they want to get serious about expanding their Linux market share, Valve needs to get serious about supporting the OS's that Linux professionals use at home.

Maybe it's RedHat's responsibility to make their OS compatible with Steam and Steam games. It seems like they're not meeting your needs as a desktop user. Which makes sense since all they care about is enterprise installs and making Linux as complicated as humanly possible so that companies have to buy a support contract.

This kinda sucks but Valve hasn't been doing anything lately to enrich SteamOS or Linux gaming.

It's pretty clear what went down. They just wanted to fire a warning shot at Microsoft. Microsoft heard it and any thoughts of a closed store went up in smoke. So Valve just went back to not caring about Linux.

Honestly, Valve needs to die. It's an old, overweight, lazy company that produces nothing yet rakes in tons of money by scalping off a third of everyone else's hard work. They have a monopoly on PC gaming and that's just hurting the industry. Fortunately there are competing gaming platforms like consoles and mobile.

[bug77]

What? People don't flock to play old titles again just because they're ported to Linux? That can't be.

[cj.wijtmans]

What? People don't flock to play old titles again just because they're ported to Linux? That can't be.

exactly what "old title" that was popular is ported to linux besides civ and 1 or 2 others?

[Baemir]

From 0,88% to 0,84%... sounds like one dude uninstalled linux lol.

[Mystro256]

IMO Valve is making a mistake in hitching their wagon to Ubuntu. More than a few Linux users don't like Ubuntu and don't like Unity. Yes I'm aware there are community supported derivatives that provide an alternative to Unity, but that's not the point - none of those are officially supported by Valve.

In the US at least, probably Valve's largest market, I'd wager that a significant number of those gaming at home on Linux, also work in IT. Any Linux IT professional in the US will tell you, the defacto standard for enterprise Linux deployments is Red Hat. RHEL owns the enterprise space, and even the major players like AWS Amazon Linux are just RHEL derivatives.

As a RHEL certified IT professional, I of course use RHEL and CentOS and Fedora at home. Why would I want to bother learning a completely different OS when my day job is managing RHEL servers? Unfortunately, Valve has decided that RHEL and CentOS and Fedora are for the community to support, and they don't want to bother with them. I run into a handful of games that simply don't launch on RHEL 7 but they work fine in Ubuntu. No, I haven't bothered to troubleshoot the issue, and quite frankly, I shouldn't have to - I'm a paying Valve customer. If they want to get serious about expanding their Linux market share, Valve needs to get serious about supporting the OS's that Linux professionals use at home.

I'm a long term fedora user and I don't have any issues... Steam comes with a runtime, which is huge, but almost pretty much guarantees it will work without much modification on other distros. I think the only issue was that Crayon Physics doesn't have sound. But, for example, Bioshock Infinite works great, all the value games have no issues, no complaints with Borderland, and so on and so forth. Which games did you have issues with? Perhaps the EL7 libraries are too old?

[LubosD]

Reason 1: There haven't been many AAA releases for Linux lately.
Reason 2: I mostly use Steam on Linux. Yet, in the past 2-3 years I only saw the survey on Linux twice, but at least 5 times on Windows. Feels strange.

[LeJimster]

I have been full time on Linux for ~18 months now and I've seen one hardware survey in all that time. Why does it have to be doom and gloom. Focus on the postives.