Steam Linux Usage Reportedly Ticks Up To 0.8% For August

Due to the US Labor Day holiday, Valve was slow in updating their monthly figures for their controversial Steam Survey of hardware/software data by polled users. At least for their initial batch of August numbers they are reporting a small increase in the Linux gaming population.

By now most Linux gamers either trust or hate the Steam Survey with some arguing its inaccurate or biased or simply broken methodology for polling enough users. But most cross-platform game developers do report it to be fairly accurate with their Linux sales generally aligning to the Steam survey metrics, at least not wildly different. If you are interested in it, the magic number for August is 0.8%.

Valve says there was 0.8% Linux use for August while Windows was at 96.2% and macOS at 2.99%. They report the 0.8% Linux use as a 0.01% increase over July. The numbers have been flakey and revised a few times in recent months, but this 0.80% for August aligns with what we have generally been seeing at 0.7~0.85% for the Linux gaming marketshare on Steam.

At least on a percentage basis, it's a nice increase year-over-year with August 2017 hitting just 0.63% and 0.58% for August 2018. It was one year ago that Valve introduced Steam Play (powered by Wine/Proton and DXVK) for running now thousands of Windows games on Linux. Since then the Steam Linux gaming population has continued growing bit by bit so it's at least closer to the one percent threshold.

Those wanting to dig through the August 2019 Steam Survey results can find them on SteamPowered.com.