Valve Publishes Initial Steam Linux Figures For 2019

Valve has just published their monthly "Steam Survey" results that are always interesting for seeing the Linux usage metrics.

Steam's Linux marketshare ended 2018 at around 0.82% for the month of December, which has been rising in recent months following Valve's roll-out of Steam Play for allowing Windows games to run on Linux with the Steam client using their Wine-based Proton and DXVK.

Earlier in 2018, prior to Steam Play, the Linux market-share was as low as 0.28~0.3%, among the all-time lows at least on a percentage basis for the portion of Linux gamers on Valve's platform.

Now for the January 2019 Steam metrics, with this year marking seven years since Valve rolled out the official Steam Linux client, the percentage of Linux users strikes 0.82%... Yep, at least if the numbers are accurate this month, the Linux percentage is flat for January 2019.

Meanwhile, the January 2019 figures show Windows growing by 0.06% to 95.92% while macOS dropped by 0.04% to 3.27%. So there may be some slight changes in the Linux percentage, but nothing statistically significant and still below the 1% mark.

Of course, with the Steam overall user-base likely growing each month (unless the Epic Game Stores or the like has taken enough hit yet), the total Linux gamer base might be larger now than one month ago but not on a percentage basis up against macOS and Windows.

As for the Linux-specific stats, they show among Steam Linux gamers that Intel still commands around 79% of the CPU market-share, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 remains the most popular graphics card, and 1080p still reigns on half of the systems polled.

Those wanting to dig through the latest Steam Survey numbers can do so here.