Steam Linux Usage For November: 0.27%

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Steam Linux Usage For November: 0.27%

Valve is reporting the Linux gaming marketshare for November 2017 at a mere 0.27%...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Steam-Linux-November-2017

[perpetually high]

Wow, sometimes I really forget what a minority I am. #WeAreThe0.27Percent

[peppercats]

likely has to do with the massive influx of chinese steam users due to player unknown's battlegrounds
they're ruining basically every game review page with "NO CHINESE VERSION" spammed

[nazar-pc]

Folks, I'm trying to get market share higher by playing basically every day, but Steam doesn't give me a dialog to report my presence

[ethana2]

This site has a lot of tremendous investigative journalism in the form of benchmarks and looking for git commits and reporting from conferences. It's annoying that we can't have a week go by without a post about steam linux market share and cries of lügenpresse accompanying every one of them-- or the bizarre assertion that usage isn't "accurate" because the users are Chinese.

If you think linux isn't accurately represented in steam's numbers, then augment PTS with a way to test it empirically. It's not false just because it's unfavorable.

[andrei_me]

IMHO the issue is that Steam doesn't release absolute numbers, so this chinese tsunami of new players lowers the percentage of Linux players, even if the absolute number of Linux players have increased since the 2% from the beginning of Steam Linux

[chilinux]

The Linux GPU stats seem to go against the myth that Linux users don't like to spend money. There are plenty of free to play games for Linux on Steam so the statistics should include people who are cheap. But while the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti made the top 6 Window user GPUs, neither of those budget GPUs made it on the Linux top 6. In fact, of the six listed in the article, none appear to normally sell for under $200.

[stormcrow]

This site has a lot of tremendous investigative journalism in the form of benchmarks and looking for git commits and reporting from conferences. It's annoying that we can't have a week go by without a post about steam linux market share and cries of lügenpresse accompanying every one of them-- or the bizarre assertion that usage isn't "accurate" because the users are Chinese.

If you think linux isn't accurately represented in steam's numbers, then augment PTS with a way to test it empirically. It's not false just because it's unfavorable.

The percentages can be accurate while still being misleading. What we really need is the raw numbers which, faik, Steam doesn't report. If you have only two people that play a game, but someone reports a jump in their user base by 100%, that's still only four players. What people are cautioning against isn't that the Chinese ingress is insignificant, only that those that look at it as a pointer that Steam Linux users are abandoning ship isn't likely correct. It probably isn't growing significantly, but it's also not likely "sky is falling" as some seem to want to think.

Worldwide, I'd suggest that Steam's numbers are probably pretty accurate to get an idea of which OSes to target for ROI in geographic regions. These numbers are for development houses to use for targeting customers. They aren't meant to be used to say a platform is dying, growing, or stagnant without taking a look at the raw numbers because Steam has not been targeting all geographical regions since day one. Skews in percentages are going to happen each time they enter a new market. Those new percentages aren't going to be indicative of a rise or drop in previous raw numbers before entry.

One thing that is not mentioned at all, is just how many people are dual booting Windows/Linux. I would suggest it's statistically significant to the relatively small Linux user base. I more often get the survey popup in Windows than I do Linux. Are they counting me as one user? Two users? I don't know, and I doubt they even report it.

[Helios747]

my favorite thing about people complaining about chinese skewing statistics is that you're pretty much saying that chinese people aren't worth counting because they aren't "the actual userbase" because last I checked they're just as much of a user as you and I

[Zoll]

We should start a betting game! How low the % would be for Linux before it bounces back?! I'd say no lower than 0.1%!