Steam On Linux Usage Spikes To Nearly 2% In July, Larger Marketshare Than Apple macOS

The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare.

According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That's a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months... It's also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been.

When looking at the Steam Linux breakdown, the SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck is now accounting for around 42% of all Linux gamers on Steam.

Meanwhile, AMD CPU marketshare among Linux gamers has reached 69%.

The Steam Survey results for July show Windows 10 64-bit losing 1.56% marketshare and Linux gaining the healthy 0.52% of that. This is also the first time the Linux gaming marketshare outpasses Apple macOS on Steam!

With the SteamOS / Steam Deck monthly numbers not showing any magnificent gains, I am curious over this 0.5% increase for Linux gaming overall and whether it's genuine.

The likely explanation is when looking at the demographics and seeing Steam by Chinese users dropping 3.4% while the English usage picked up by 3.4%. Chinese gamers and reporting differences there have previously vastly swayed Steam statistics in prior months. This may be the case again here. In any event it's quite interesting to see this month's numbers and potentially there being more Linux gamers now (thanks in large part to the Steam Deck...) than Apple macOS on Steam.

This month's survey results can be found here.