Every article tag can be clicked to get a list of all articles in that category. Every article tag also has an RSS feed! You can customize an RSS feed too!
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

GOL Survey Results: April

By - | Views: 15,632
The results for the April survey are now available for you to take a look at and compare with results from previous months.

You can find the new survey for May here, so please fill that out if you haven’t already.

Our graph maker Fedso is working on locking colours to answers and has done so with a few already. Also looking at making better colour choices (ie. green for Nvidia, red for AMD, etc.) There may be something which tries to estimate a total trend in game sales coming soon, but we’re still trying to work out how we’ll do that - hopefully will be ready by next month.

There have been no major changes or trends this month other than with the number of respondents and the usual unique questions, so analysis will be limited to those this month.

Please click on the images to enlarge. Once enlarged, you can also cycle through them using the arrows.

Respondents
image

Many thanks to the 2362 people who took the time to complete the survey! That’s over twice as much as last time (1026) and way over the 1000 mark which I wanted to stay above. A lot of this seems to be because of Reddit, but could also be increasing traffic figures on GOL as well, hopefully Liam can comment on that.

We also already have over 1300 responses already for the May survey, so it seems like keeping it above 1000 is no longer a worry. I’m pretty happy with the response this survey has gotten and hopefully we’ll continue to improve things and provide more information as time goes on.

One thing that is beginning to concern me now is duplicate responses. We have no way of knowing how many are duplicates or if this is even a serious problem at all. There currently is no limit to how many times people can fill the survey out and we’re relying on trust in the community to try not to mess with the results.

Hopefully at some point we can get this integrated into GOL and have a requirement that only registered users can fill in the survey, but that may be a long time away so for now we’ll just have to say to people that filling the survey in multiple times to see your favourite Desktop Environment climb a few percentage points is really shooting all of us in the foot.

Question 1 - Do you currently use Linux as your primary PC gaming platform?
image

Question 2 - Did you use Wine to play games last month?
image

Question 3 - Did you use a Windows partition for gaming last month?
image

Question 4 - What distribution do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
image

Question 5 - What Desktop Environment do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
image

One minor observation here is that Unity has taken over KDE (Plasma) for the first time. I kind of expected this to go the other way around since I found Plasma 5 to be pretty awesome and was thinking of switching to it from XFCE for my main PC. This might be because it's a little buggy around the moment. Would be nice to hear some thoughts on this from KDE users!

Question 6 - Did you change your primary Linux gaming distribution last month?
image

Question 7 - What graphics card do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
image

It might be worth reminding that Steam's statistics across all platforms are 52% for Nvidia, 19% for Intel and 28% for AMD. This disparity is probably a combination of the state of AMD video drivers on Linux and the fact that GOL most likely has a lower percentage of "casual" gamers than Steam as a whole, hence the higher Intel figures.

Question 8 - Which drivers do you use for that graphics card?
image

AMD
image

Intel
image

Nvidia
image

Question 9 - What CPU do you use on your primary Linux gaming PC?
image

Question 10 - Did you exclusively buy Linux-supported games last month?
image

Question 11 - How many Linux games did you buy last month?
image

Question 12 - Which of these retailers did you use to buy your Linux games last month?
image

Unique Question 1 - Unique Question 1: Of the Linux games announced at GDC, which are you going to get?
image

It seems like a distant memory, but this survey came out in the context of GDC so I decided to include all the big announcements in here to get an idea of what’s most popular. I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that the Total War games were the least popular, considering that strategy is a fairly niche genre, but I did expect Evolve to do a bit better. I didn’t expect The Witcher III to come out on top considering all the complaints about the port, but otherwise these results should be fairly in line with what people expected.

I think Shadow of Mordor is the one I’m most looking forward too (if anyone cares what I think), but I’d be interested in giving pretty much all of those a try, depending on financial situations. I’d probably put GRID at number 2, simply because we don’t have any AAA racing games on Linux right now and it’s been a long time since I’ve played one. If anyone wants to give their thoughts on the choices they made, it would make for interesting reading in the comments section :).

Unique Question 2 - Unique Question 2: Will you be getting a Steam Machine any time after release?
image

This is the third time I have asked this question, once in September, once before GDC and again after GDC to see if any of that made a difference to people. You can compare the results here:

September:

Yes - 11.49%
No - 29.25%
Still undecided - 30.60%
I already built my own (or planning to build my own) - 28.66%

Pre-GDC:

Yes - 10.4%
No - 31.7%
Still undecided- 32.1%
Already built my own- 9.2%
Planning to build my own - 16.8%

Post-GDC:

Yes - 7.8%
No - 41.1%
Still undecided - 26.2%
Already built my own - 10.1%
Planning to build my own - 14.8%

It seemed that while there wasn’t much change between september and just before the GDC, all that changed after the conference. It seems that interest in the systems has dropped pretty significantly.

Again, numbers are numbers and tend to be quite dehumanising, so it would be very interesting to hear what the reasons were behind this in the comments. Perhaps the silly prices of the machines influenced people, or maybe their far cheaper streaming device seems like a more tantalizing option for those with high-end PCs.

Personally, for me it’s the prices. For the kind of money they’re charging, you can build a far better gaming machine in a pretty small case and get the controller, essentially giving you something much better than what they’re offering. At some point I might do an article on the sort of machine you could build for that kind of money and do a side-by-side theoretical comparison with the numerous Steam Machine offerings.

In either case, I don’t think this is very indicative of the success that Steam Machines may or may not have, but more an indication that it’s alienated the PC market a bit. However, since the intention of Steam Machines is to bring console gamers into the PC market, then what we think doesn’t really matter to Valve, it’s only really interesting to us. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Community
0 Likes
About the author -
After many years of floating through space on the back of a missile, following a successful career in beating people up for not playing Sega Saturn, the missile returned to earth. Upon returning, I discovered to my dismay that the once great console had been discontinued and Sega had abandoned the fight to dominate the world through 32-bit graphical capabilities.

After spending some years breaking breeze blocks with my head for money and being mocked by strangers, I have found a new purpose: to beat up people for not playing on Linux.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
19 comments
Page: 1/2»
  Go to:

Liam Dawe May 9, 2015
Traffic wise: People posted it to reddit, so lots of people came in, more than usual.

Steam Machines: Stats are very different due to how many more people we have doing the survey.

As for the GDC question, I never actually saw TW3 be officially confirmed anywhere. As far as I know it still hasn't been confirmed by any of the developers.
Segata Sanshiro May 9, 2015
Quoting: liamdaweTraffic wise: People posted it to reddit, so lots of people came in, more than usual.

Steam Machines: Stats are very different due to how many more people we have doing the survey.

As for the GDC question, I never actually saw TW3 be officially confirmed anywhere. As far as I know it still hasn't been confirmed by any of the developers.

I took the games list from here https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/lots-of-big-games-confirmed-for-steamos-torchlight-ii-now-out-payday-2-mordor-and-more-coming-too.5047 - which was taken from that SteamOS sale. I guess I should have clarified that the list came from Valve and not the developers themselves.

The variations caused by number of respondents is certainly true, it may very well be the case. I just didn't really consider it too much this time because none of the other results really fluctuated by anywhere near that much. But yes, probably best to take it with a grain of salt.
RTheren May 9, 2015
Funny that PayDay 2 is actually only thing that is holding me to dual-boot. For now :)
Xzyl May 9, 2015
I don't understand how people can be using proprietary intel drivers on Linux...

Two takeaways from this, Arch continues to be a good quarter of Linux gamers.
AMD's open sauce drivers are ~50% usage amongst gamers, wow it's come along way. Wish more people
would reward them.
kalin May 9, 2015
I plan to buy amd because of open source drivers and because vulkan.
Without amd probably there will be no vulkan
HonorEDnlK May 9, 2015
The Unity increase could be to the greater number of responses submitted.

But in my case, after 3 years of using Unity I switched to KDE Plasma 5 as my main desktop environment. I consider it to be the most efficient and good looking desktop I've used so far, and having been using it since the beta I've noticed how the bugs are already going away with each update. It also seems they plan on switching from X to Wayland this year.
neffo May 10, 2015
Quoting: HonorEDnlKThe Unity increase could be to the greater number of responses submitted.

But in my case, after 3 years of using Unity I switched to KDE Plasma 5 as my main desktop environment. I consider it to be the most efficient and good looking desktop I've used so far, and having been using it since the beta I've noticed how the bugs are already going away with each update. It also seems they plan on switching from X to Wayland this year.

Likely, yeah. From memory of the various posts along the same lines on the subreddit most people use Ubuntu (and consequently Unity). GoL has a slightly more experimental crowd it seems.
Alzarath May 10, 2015
I hadn't noticed you were adding things like Awesome and i3 to the desktop environment poll (is there a difference between i3 and i3wm?). I always went straigh to None/Custom and didn't bother looking for those, considering I don't think of them as a DE. Should I start including my answer under 'Other'? Maybe you should ask what window manager people use to avoid confusion?

QuoteAgain, numbers are numbers and tend to be quite dehumanising, so it would be very interesting to hear what the reasons were behind this in the comments.

I already own a gaming PC and, considering I'm a PC gamer, I don't have much need for such a thing. Even if I did, the price would be another barrier.
loggfreak May 10, 2015
BundleStars is in there twice, once as "BundleStars" and once as "Bundle Stars"
crabel May 10, 2015
It's unlikely that the increase in respondends has affected the Steam Machine ratio, since all other questions show the same picture as before.

Speaks well for data quality. :-)
(Internet surveys are often problematic because they are easily gamed. Almost useless on controversial topics)

That said:
It was always "No" for me regarding SteamMachines, so my opinion might not be too useful. In the beginning, I thought SteamMachines were more like XBone or PS 4. A cute box. Now, there are lots of them, all looking different.

Maybe some people have realized: That's just a PC with SteamOS (and thats essentially Linux + Steam).
Also, what about "Steam Link". Maybe some people also plan to use that box instead of a SteamMachine?

Maybe ask:
Do you play in your living room? Do you plan to?
Steam Link (Yes, No, Maybe)
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.