Steam On Linux Marketshare Hits New Multi-Year High, AMD Powering ~40% Of Linux Gaming Systems

Back in July Steam on Linux re-crossed the 1.0% marketshare threshold following the announcement of the Steam Deck and continued progress around Steam Play / Proton. The Steam on Linux user-base has continued growing month by month and has hit another high with the numbers published today that cover the month of October.

According to the new survey results, Linux now commands a 1.13% marketshare on Steam, a 0.11% increase compared to September. This is a larger number than normal for Linux and assuming no revisions are made, it's likely the result of more gamers and developers trying out Linux / Steam Play ahead of Steam Deck units beginning to ship to consumers later this quarter. The Steam Deck announcement has certainly rejuvenated interest in Linux gaming and especially with Steam Play running an increasing number of modern Windows games with ease, especially now with EAC, CEG, and other DRM technologies working more nicely with Linux.

The 1.13% marketshare is the largest that it's been for Linux in a number of years. Given Valve's past revisions to Steam Survey numbers after the fact and some flakiness at times with the numbers, it's hard to say when as a percent this number was just as large. In the early days of Steam on Linux approaching a decade ago it was around a 2% marketshare before pulling back. But back then the overall Steam user-base was much smaller than today. So today in absolute terms the 1.13% marketshare for Linux is likely the highest it's ever been in absolute Linux gamer size considering the continued growth of Steam as a platform.

Meanwhile the Windows percentage pulled back to 96.32% while macOS increased by 0.07% to 2.56%.

When it comes to the Linux-specific numbers, Intel CPUs shed another 0.3% to AMD. Intel CPUs are now found in about 59.7% of Linux gaming systems to AMD at 40.2%. AMD on Linux is much more common than on Windows where Intel still has a 69% marketshare.

The October survey numbers can be found at steampowered.com.