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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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iskaputt Jul 5, 2017
Quoting: ShmerlGaming is growing in general. For example GOG added Chinese section to their forums recently. And they show users growth every year as well.

See https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2017/05/cd-projekt-group-results-in-1q-2017-1.pdf

One can guess from the increase in sales revenues, but are there actual numbers for users?
N30N 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....?
No, the ≃1% is of active monthly users, which the above slide says is 67 million. We have no stats for peak concurrent Linux users.

What is interesting is that this shows that the 125 million "active" users accounts, Valve talked about back in 2015, are not actually used all that often.


Last edited by N30N on 5 July 2017 at 9:50 pm UTC
bubexel Jul 5, 2017
Quoting: silmethI wonder – what Western Europe means there? Is it European Union? Is it geographic Western Europe (west of Germany)? Is it everything west of Russian territories (= European part of Russia?)? Does it include Central European part of the Union, does it include Belarus and Ukraine?

Western Europe according to this definition is formed by countries with dominant Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, including countries which are considered part of Central Europe now:

Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.

just google! it knows everything!
reongol Jul 6, 2017
Am I the only one excited as hell for the new UI or what?
I freaking love when things get new UIs I know a lot of people don't.
Nyamiou Jul 6, 2017
Quoting: meggermanAny idea of what the new UI code is written in ? If it is QT that would be pretty sweet.

It's probably going to still be good old Steam with just some modifications to the look and feel (probably mostly on the library part). I highly doubt that they do much more than that since that is already probably a collosal amount of work (that they should use for HL3 instead but that is another story) and nobody want radical changes to the software they use everyday.

Also we don't know if we are going to get those modifications at the same time as the Windows users are going to have them, and given Valve time they may not even be released this summer or even this year, so let not rejoice too quickly.


Last edited by Nyamiou on 6 July 2017 at 1:02 am UTC
Shmerl Jul 6, 2017
Quoting: iskaputt
Quoting: ShmerlGaming is growing in general. For example GOG added Chinese section to their forums recently. And they show users growth every year as well.

See https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/wp-content/uploads-en/2017/05/cd-projekt-group-results-in-1q-2017-1.pdf

One can guess from the increase in sales revenues, but are there actual numbers for users?

I surely saw some document about it. I'll try to find it.

UPDATE: I can't find it now, some documents are missing from their site. You can also try searching for their presentations on Youtube.


Last edited by Shmerl on 6 July 2017 at 2:33 am UTC
bingus Jul 6, 2017
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[quote=Mal]
Quoting: Duke TakeshiOceania beats latin america in sales oO[/and quote]

Considering how much companies overcharge prices in that region it is not that surprising at all.

And considering they claimed they don't do business in Australia.
ison111 Jul 6, 2017
Just please god tell me they aren't going to do that stupid monochromatic UI like in those leaked images a while back where even the game art in the library all had a monochromatic filter applied.
qptain Nemo Jul 6, 2017
Quoting: reongolAm I the only one excited as hell for the new UI or what?
I freaking love when things get new UIs I know a lot of people don't.
Me too! Although I'm a little bit conflicted because I just installed a custom skin for Steam (pressure) which I like and it will probably become useless after the update, at least for a little while, so I'm also a little bummed. :D
Wendigo Jul 6, 2017
I hope they will add the search filters from the shop page to the games library.
When searching for games that have local / online multiplayer or coop play you are forced to look up each game separately.
I have several hundred games in my library so that might take a while.
This really annoys me about steam.


Last edited by Wendigo on 6 July 2017 at 7:04 am UTC
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