Monday, August 2nd 2021
Valve's Steam Hardware Survey Shows Progress for Gaming on Linux, Breaking 1% Marketshare
When Valve made a debut of Proton for Steam on Linux, the company committed to enabling Linux gamers from across the globe to play all of the latest games available for the Windows platform, on their Linux distributions. Since the announcement, the market share of people who game on Linux has been rather stagnating for a while. When Proton was announced, the Linux gaming market share jumped to 2%, according to a Valve survey. However, later on, it dropped and remained at the stagnating 0.8~0.9% mark. Today, according to the latest data obtained from Steam Hardware Survey, we see that the Linux gaming market share has reached 1.0% in July, making for a +0.14% increase. What drove the spike in usage is unknown, however, it is interesting to see the new trend. You can check out the Steam Hardware Survey data here.
43 Comments on Valve's Steam Hardware Survey Shows Progress for Gaming on Linux, Breaking 1% Marketshare
www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Valve-New-CPU-Freq
But game devs should support vulkan. its just way better than directX
this is.... INSANE!
YEAR OF THE LINUX, BOYS
Honestly, most people use Windows because that's what comes installed on their computer. That's the reality of it. If Linux were preinstalled on most PCs being sold, I think we'd see that be reflected in usage by the masses, but unless that happens, there will never be widespread adoption because your typical user isn't going to be installing an OS.
A lot of people who compalin about framerate issues are usually using an oudates MESA driver, or worse, an nvidia card.
The lack of packages is a pain, but OTOH, if you dont have all the LEET GAMERZ stuff, it wont affect you. Regular headsets work fine without special software, and newer light up keyboards have open source software available to them. There's more nuance to that number.
Linux actually peaked at either 1.14 or 1.16% WAYYY back in 2013 when steaem for linux first appeared, then the percentage quickly dropped to the .7 range, and has been slowly climbing since. The key here is the total number of users hasnt gone down. At the previous high, steam had 65 million total users and roughly 5-6 million daily active users. Today steam has 120 million montly active users and 62.6 million DAILY users. Montly counts from 2013 are hard to find but the total monthly active was 67 million in 2017.
That would mean roughly 1.2 million monthly linux users, a not small number of people, and a dramatic increase from 2017, when linux would have had roughly 500-550k users by the same metric.
Not having access to basic software for keyboards, headsets, music, and other software platforms has nothing to do with being a l33t gamer.
Maybe linux can break 1% again when win-10 support ends on 2025.
Rights of Property, 1776.