Steam Linux Percentage For May Points To A New Multi-Year High

Valve's May 2020 numbers show another uptick for Steam Linux gaming usage, pointing towards the Linux marketshare continuing to increase with the overall Steam user-base in this coronavirus period leading to record usage with the extra time spent by gamers at home.

Valve's just-published Linux numbers put their overall percentage at 0.91%, an increase of 0.04% over the month prior. It's still below 1% and well off the ~2% back when Steam on Linux was new, but this 0.91% at least bumps it to a new multi-year high.

Back in January Steam on Linux hit 0.9% that was a high for the time but then tapered off in more recent months. This is the highest in percentage terms (and likely in overall gamers given Steam's continued increase in user count) for quite a while and well off the lows seen back in pre Steam Play time around 2018 when it was around 0.5% and at times even below 0.3%. But due to Valve's occasional revisions to the numbers and their sometimes funny math (and many doubting the quality of the survey itself), difficult to say definitively when the Linux gaming marketshare was last above 0.91%, just that it's been a long time. Meanwhile last month's numbers put Windows at 95.05% and macOS at 4.04%.

With Linux hardware support / drivers continuing to get better and with Steam Play (Proton) getting in incredibly good shape for running modern Windows games on Linux, seeing the increase in the Linux percentage comes as little surprise. It will be interesting to see in 2020 if Steam on Linux can once again crack above 1%.

The Steam Survey data for May can be found at SteamPowered.com.

The Steam Linux data also points to Intel losing another 2% marketshare on the CPU side coming in at 71% to AMD at 28% (compared to Steam on Windows seeing 77.5% Intel CPU usage). The Linux numbers still point to the Radeon RX 480/580 and GeForce GTX 1060 as being the most popular graphics cards for Linux gamers.