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Recently, Valve did a presentation about Steam during Indigo 2017 which took place in June. The interesting and not surprising thing here is that Steam just keeps on growing.

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I knew Steam would be growing, but I didn't think it would be growing that quickly. By the looks of it, since 2015 they're about 2.4 million away from doubling the concurrent users record. It might sound like a lot, but they've already gone from 8.4 to 14 million.

I believe that the decline of Linux in the Steam survey is partly due to the rise of Steam in other markets, where Linux just isn't really popular. According to one of their slides, sales in Asia accounted for 17% total Steam sales for 2017 so far, that's pretty huge, when you consider say Western Europe is only 29% so far this year. From what I remember, Asia has been growing as a market for Steam for the past few years and quite quickly by the looks of it.

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When looking at those sorts of percentages, it's not hard to come to the conclusion that growth in markets where Windows is more prevalent will shrink the Linux market share.

They do confirm that a UI update is coming as well, which will update a lot of ways you interact with Steam. This will affect curators, developers and normal users, like this slide gives you an idea of:
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You can check out this post with many more slide pictures.

It's also interesting to see this page that Steam has, showing the number of support requests sent them in the last 24 hours. Over 200K of them were for refunds, wow! Surprising to see the technical support requests being so low as well at under 4K. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Editorial, Steam
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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qptain Nemo Jul 5, 2017
QuoteI hope they finally add the ability for a curator to edit the blurb of their recommendation, stupid to not have an edit function.
You can. You have to go to your group, the curator tab, then click on the recommendation there and then you'll have an option to edit it. And yeah, it's not the simplest most obvious way.
km3k Jul 5, 2017
Yes, Asia is becoming huge for Steam. The developer of Defender's Quest tweeted about their worldwide sales during the Steam sale. China is close behind the US in revenue and higher in total number of units sold.
Liam Dawe Jul 5, 2017
Quoting: qptain Nemo
QuoteI hope they finally add the ability for a curator to edit the blurb of their recommendation, stupid to not have an edit function.
You can. You have to go to your group, the curator tab, then click on the recommendation there and then you'll have an option to edit it. And yeah, it's not the simplest most obvious way.
Bah! Removed that line, but yeah that's not very convenient I completely overlooked that, as I was on the "store" styled page for it. Quite a nuisance.
Leopard Jul 5, 2017
That looks pointless to me actually. I don't care about how Steam and it's Windows user base grows.

Valve should encourage Linux usage on Asia , that is the only way i can be happy about this kind of news.
Guest Jul 5, 2017
Any idea of what the new UI code is written in ? If it is QT that would be pretty sweet.
Metallinatus Jul 5, 2017
The fact that Linux can keep itself around the 1% mark all the time despite all the growing going on at Steam shows that the number of people on Linux there is growing more or less in the same pace. Remember when we were ≃1% of 10 million? Well, now we are ≃1% of 14 million! But still "the market is too small", amirite....?
Maki Jul 5, 2017
Quoting: MetallinatusThe fact that Linux can keep itself around the 1% mark all the time despite all the growing going on at Steam shows that the number of people on Linux there is growing more or less in the same pace. Remember when we were ≃1% of 10 million? Well, now we are ≃1% of 14 million! But still "the market is too small", amirite....?
Very much this.
Eike Jul 5, 2017
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Quoting: LeopardThat looks pointless to me actually. I don't care about how Steam and it's Windows user base grows.

Valve should encourage Linux usage on Asia , that is the only way i can be happy about this kind of news.

We get the percentage of Linux users monthly. Would be nice to have the gross number to estimate the Linux number an its development.
MaCroX95 Jul 5, 2017
Quoting: MetallinatusThe fact that Linux can keep itself around the 1% mark all the time despite all the growing going on at Steam shows that the number of people on Linux there is growing more or less in the same pace. Remember when we were ≃1% of 10 million? Well, now we are ≃1% of 14 million! But still "the market is too small", amirite....?

The market will always be too small for lazy ass developers :P It's just lucky that we have Feral who prove that porting games to such platforms actually makes them money.

Also the companies that sell linux devices have exploded in popularity recently.
rkfg Jul 5, 2017
Quoting: meggermanAny idea of what the new UI code is written in ? If it is QT that would be pretty sweet.
Unlikely. They have their own GUI toolkit and that's not likely to change. They wrote about it in this thread (partially on topic).
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