Valve's Steam Numbers For February Show A Small Dip In Linux Gaming Percentage

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 1 March 2019 at 07:27 PM EST. 29 Comments
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Valve has just uploaded their Steam Survey hardware/software results for February 2019 and unfortunately the Linux gaming market-share has not continued an upward trend, at least on a percentage basis.

While the percentage of Steam Linux gamers has been on a slight incline the past number of months following the initial roll-out of Steam Play for easily running Windows games on Linux via their Wine-based Proton paired with DXVK, that trend slipped in February. It's possible there still is roughly the same amount of gamers or even more, depending upon how much the overall Steam customer basis increased over the past month, but at least on a percentage basis it's down.

Valve's February numbers put the Linux gaming market-share now at 0.77%, or a drop of 0.05% compared to January. Meanwhile their data puts the Windows gaming percentage at 96.12% and macOS dropped 0.16% to 3.11%.

For year-over-year metrics, Valve had reported a 0.75% marketshare for Linux back in February 2017 while last year (February 2018) it was just 0.28%, some of the lowest points of Steam Linux adoption prior to Steam Play kicking things into gear and making Linux gaming more appealing to more individuals with now having a wider selection of quality game titles.

When digging into the Linux specific data, the Steam Survey shows Intel CPUs powering around 78% of the systems (a drop of 0.42% to the month prior), the GeForce GTX 1060 still being the most popular graphics card, 1080p still being used by about half of the Linux gamers, and most Linux gaming systems having four physical CPU cores.

Those interested in the Steam Survey results for February can dig into the numbers via SteamPowered.com.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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