Steam Kicks Off 2020 With Linux Gaming At The Highest Point In A While

Valve has just reported their January 2020 numbers from the controversial Steam Survey.

Running off December's numbers, at first they reported a 0.14% decline in the Linux gaming market-share only to revise it late in January. The revised figure for December 2019 put the Linux gaming population on Steam for the month at 0.83%. That is within the normal range we're used to seeing out of the Steam Survey with since the Steam Play launch roughly around 0.8% and jiving with what various game studios generally independently report as the Linux gaming customer base being at 1% or less.

For January 2020, Valve is reporting the Linux market-share at 0.9%, a 0.07% increase over their revised January numbers. This is while Windows is at 96.09% and macOS at 3.01%.

It's nice seeing a post-holiday bump for the Linux gaming percentage and is actually the highest we've seen the Linux gaming market-share in at least one year. It's hard to give specifics, however, due to Valve routinely updating their monthly date and of course keeping in mind these are percentage statistics as opposed to absolute data based upon their ever increasing customer base.

While this 0.9% Linux gaming user-base we have seen in at least a year, it's still off in percentage terms from the close to ~2% originally seen when Steam was brought to Linux and Valve highly promoting the concept of Steam Machines, etc. But at least in recent memory this 0.9% for Steam on Linux is looking good. See all the numbers here.