Steam Linux Usage For November: 0.27%

[Zoll]

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

Why does this matter? 0.27% is still accurate since they are using essentially the same method for all.

[Luke_Wolf]

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.

Uh lol? are you new here? Or do you just not pay close attention?

What Michael does is hardly investigative journalism, he has an aggregator that trolls mailing lists, blogs, and such looking for keywords which he then writes articles on the choice bits, often not really digging in particularly deep when he writes his articles, to the chagrin of those who post to lists he aggregates. Furthermore while he benchmarks regularly the vast majority of benchmarks he runs can hardly be considered investigative or even necessarily good, he just does a lot of them, and his overall business philosophy is quantity over quality.

As to the Steam numbers, if you were paying attention rather than having your head up your ass, as is clearly the case; you would have noted that nobody is saying Phoronix is bullshit for the numbers (Mr. I'm going to invoke the nazis), they are saying that the pessimism shown by Michael because of the numbers is unwarranted, and that the hardware survey has a bad sampling methodology that makes it inaccurate especially when Steam could just do a population survey rather than a sample survey which would provide an actually accurate view of the steam user base, and this particular complaint is not unique in the least to Phoronix, the Steam forums and elsewhere view the sampling methodology as sketchy at best, and Valve has yet to make a statement as to how it works, and many have held this opinion long before Steam For Linux came to the market.

[nuetzel]

~15 minutes ago Steam presented me for the _first_ time a dialog to report my presence...
...after nearly 2 years of Steam under Wine and now Steam on LInux (since November the 4th).

[hansg]

So, given these numbers, why would any publishers invest money in a Linux version? The effort for porting, testing, packaging, supporting, etc. is surely lots higher than the income from that 0.27%...

[RealNC]

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

Yep, that's just you it seems :P

I use Linux 85% of the time, but boot to Windows for playing games.

[birdie]

Share with us in the forums of what you think about the situation.

The situation is extremely stable - no one gives a fuck about Linux on the desktop. You could think that an OS which has been in development for 26 (!) freaking years could reach the level of maturity, stability, support and operability of Windows 2000 (which was developed for a several times shorter period), but, nope, let's create a development model which precludes from creating an OS which might become usable even in theory. Things might change if we agree on one distro which offers at least five to seven years support, yet has a stable kernel which easily allows to use new devices. Too bad, we don't have such a kernel and we don't have such a distro. RHEL/CentOS are the closest to what I've been thinking but they are let down by the inability to use new kernel releases (at least officially without too much hassle).

[birdie]

So, given these numbers, why would any publishers invest money in a Linux version? The effort for porting, testing, packaging, supporting, etc. is surely lots higher than the income from that 0.27%...

And naturally they don't.

[eydee]

Perhaps in 2018 the PUBG popularity will recede when we can get a more accurate look at the Linux gaming marketshare, which will be interesting to see.

Well, that's the strange thing. All those Chinese people playing PUBG on their pirated Windows 7 count as fully qualified Steam users. It is accurate.

[birdie]

and that the hardware survey has a bad sampling methodology that makes it inaccurate

That's some high level bullshitting or trolling, can't decide which one. Count the number of triple AAA games for Linux and Windows - because that's where the money and people are. People will not install Linux only to play Indies. They want to actually game. Even Doom hasn't been released for Linux even though it uses Vulkan which is ostensibly 100% portable between OSes and even hardware devices (it's supported on mobile).

Linux fanboys always keep making up excuses why various surveys/statistics/etc lie. The sad thing is that they don't lie. The sad thing is that outside of Phoronix and Linux related websites, most people do not know what Linux is and they don't care either. They have life to live. They don't want to have sex with solving bugs, incompatibilities while swimming through regressions and slow downs.

An Intel WiFi adapter on my Skylake laptop which I bought two (!) fucking years ago is still not supported by Fedora 27(!) because Fedora still doesn't include its firmware which I had to look for, download and install manually. Do you believe the average Joe will want to go though all this bullshit? Do you really believe the average Joe will want to save freaking $100 (a license for Windows 10) only to spend literal days of his life to sieve through all the bugs and problems each Linux distro has?

Get back down to Earth. You either have no life to use Linux or Linux is a prerequisite for your profession. There are no other use cases for this OS.

I'm sure as hell most Phoronix readers are either system/network administrators, programmers or they are closely related to IT.

[blackiwid]

So, given these numbers, why would any publishers invest money in a Linux version? The effort for porting, testing, packaging, supporting, etc. is surely lots higher than the income from that 0.27%...

There are many reasons:

1. not want to be dependend on microsoft, if they desite tomorow that steam is not installable on their next windows version and then taken 20% fee for every game they offer over their shop, you can't do much, porting then afterwards the game is 1000x more expensive then do it from the beginning.
2. its not that expensive anymore, valve wrote all the tools and in most game engines its just another checkbox to create a additinoal linux version. "packaging" I am not really shure what that means, do you mean making installers? else its all online over steam so no physical packages are needed.

3. The percentage of users doesnt say much. it only counts how much users use that os, it does not count how much money each of that indivual spend. so if 70% Windows users only buy 1 or even 0 games per year and the linux users on avarage 5 that 0.27% can be worth much much more.

4. general plattform stats don't say much, per game stats are much much more interesting.

Lets think about 5 games 4 have no linux support and 1 has linux support right? so the 4 without linux support have 0% linux users the 1 with linux support must then if the number of sales are the same on each game be 1.35% But often the AAA titles have no linux support, so to get to the 0.27% in general such indie games must have 5-20% linux sales to get the avarage 0.27% because most aaa titles have 0% linux users.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gamin..._linux_dota_2/

I don't buy his numbers especialy the 14% linux marketshare on desktop, he should link how he got to that numbers , he even says himself take it with grains of salt, but argument looks pretty solid.

And of course even if that is true one free game alone with many linux users doesnt make it a good market for companies automaticly.

Btw take me. I play 99% of the time one game LoL there is no linux version, so I can't switch to linux (on that gaming-only pc) and why would I, I need a special gaming pc anyway, cause I don't want to mix proprietary software with non proprietary, so even if there would be a linux version of leage of legends I would likely only switch if I would need to reinstall or upgrade windows. Cause never change a running system right?

But I bought 1 game recent years this Ark Dino survival game. I would not have bought it if it would not have support for linux. (even the support is not that good as far as I understand). Still I added it under windows in steam. So it gets counted as windows user/game, but it would not have sold without linux support.

So its really hard to messure how much linux support increases your sells.