Steam Survey Results For August Show A Linux Dip After A Very Exciting July

In July the Steam Survey results pointed to a half percent jump in the Linux gaming marketshare, taking it to nearly 2% thanks to the success of Valve's Steam Deck that runs their Arch Linux powered SteamOS platform. After the big boost in July you are probably wondering what happened in August... Well, a few minutes ago the new Steam Survey monthly results were published.

Steam on Linux for July was at 1.96%, which is nearly at an all-time high in percentage terms for the decade that Steam on Linux has been natively available. Steam on Linux has continued to rise nicely over the past year and a half that the Steam Deck has been available, in large part thanks to the success as well of Steam Play for allowing Windows game catalogs to run rather well on Linux. With Steam on Linux being at around 2% only when it originally launched, in absolute terms the July figures were the best-ever for the Linux gaming space.

While July was at 1.96% for Linux, the August numbers show a 0.14% dip to 1.82%. Interestingly, macOS dipped by 0.27% to 1.57% while Windows rose by 0.4% to 96.61%.

For those wondering why the Steam Linux numbers dropped while the Steam Deck continues to be very popular, it's possibly again another month impacted by large swings in Chinese traffic. The Steam Survey results for August show the English language userbase dropping by 2.34% globally to 35.57% while Simplified Chinese picked up 2.74%. That's a pretty big difference for the span of one month for all Steam users globally. So that -- with much of the Simplified Chinese users running Windows -- being a possible reason for the Linux dip.

When pulling up the Linux-specific survey results, SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck gained another 2% marketshare to now commanding around 44% of the reported Linux gamers.

Among Linux gamers, AMD CPUs power around 71% of the systems. In part due to the Steam Deck being powered by an AMD APU. Meanwhile Steam on Windows has the AMD CPU marketshare at around 33%.

The Linux GPU results also point to around 44% of Linux gamers doing so via the Steam Deck with the VanGogh APU that powers the Steam Deck being the number one reported graphics processor.

The August 2023 Steam Survey results are available in full via SteamPowered.com.