Linux market share on Steam now at a 16 month high after a rounding error was fixed

78/59... 32.2% increase. Cool. I hope it sets a durable trend. :)

With these rates we will have total world domination in no time. ;)

There is definitely an impact on the Linux market share since Proton. I just hope this is not a statistical anomaly, as new Steam client installations have a pretty high probability to see the survey. So this could mean, lots of people are trying Steam on Linux now, and test if their games work with Proton... and maybe don't stick with Linux the month after. But from how I understand how the survey works, those people won't be counted the month after it again, as the survey should occur only once a year. Time will tell.

Nevertheless, it's nice to see [tweets](https://twitter.com/puppygames/status/1047117232919236608) like this:

@puppygames
Linux is now twice as big a platform for us as MacOS is (on Steam, anyway)

It feels so good to know that Valve is really behind their commitment, to make Linux the gaming platform of the future and seeing that it is slowly but steadily becoming true.

There is definitely an impact on the Linux market share since Proton. I just hope this is not a statistical anomaly, as new Steam client installations have a pretty high probability to see the survey. So this could mean, lots of people are trying Steam on Linux now, and test if their games work with Proton... and maybe don't stick with Linux the month after. But from how I understand how the survey works, those people won't be counted the month after it again, as the survey should occur only once a year. Time will tell.

I think one of the big reasons is also the major decline in people playing PUBG. Look at the "Players every day" graph on SteamDB and see how far it has fallen, which is big considering it was a game previously pushing the "simplified chinese" use up high. 3.2 million in January to around 1 million now.

Steam Survey shows Linux increase at +0.11%, which suggests they also revised the previous month and it puts it at 0.67% instead of 0.59% (before they reported 0.12% increase from 0.59% to 0.71%).


Last edited by silmeth on 4 Oct 2018 at 9:42 am UTC

" would put us back to a level we were at in September of 2016. "
but if they had those numbers in september of 2016, didnt that mean that the marketshare was even bigger than 0,78% back then ?

" would put us back to a level we were at in September of 2016. "
but if they had those numbers in september of 2016, didnt that mean that the marketshare was even bigger than 0,78% back then ?

We don't know how long this has been an issue, Valve haven't said. It might have only been an issue for one/two/three months.

With these rates we will have total world domination in no time. ;)

Imagine, in a year we'll be at 16.8%, and in two years we'll have a market share of over 470%!

Or maybe my math is a little off, that's a possibility too.

But from how I understand how the survey works, those people won't be counted the month after it again, as the survey should occur only once a year. Time will tell.

Well, some people never ever get a survey in their life. I think I am going to be that one.
But then again, I have lots of history with different sites having problems with my account.
I am that special snowflake, the exception, to stress the validity of the general rule.

I'm going to assume this issue affected previous months as well so relatively speaking, this bump caused by this fix doesn't come from Proton. I think it's a bit early for Proton to really make an impact on these statistics and that we might see more increases during the next few months.


Last edited by Brisse on 4 Oct 2018 at 10:58 am UTC

Well, some people never ever get a survey in their life. I think I am going to be that one.
But then again, I have lots of history with different sites having problems with my account.
I am that special snowflake, the exception, to stress the validity of the general rule.

So, I am the other special snowflake, which got the survey... 6 times or so two months ago, on each device, and each "OS" (Linux, dualbooted Windows and wine).
Well, it's still a hardware survey (ofc no hardware works without any kind of software), so I'm okay to get it on each device. Will be interesting, if I'll get it now in a year again, or sooner.


Last edited by Corben on 4 Oct 2018 at 11:07 am UTC

YEAH LINUX

... and if you take the last "known" numbers, how many active Steam Users there are in total ...
-> https://kotaku.com/there-are-over-125-million-steam-accounts-1687820875

... then 0.78% mean that there are about 975,000 active Linux users on Steam in absolute numbers.

Probably even more. The article is from February 2015. With 8.9 million simultaneously active users, we were happy about a new high. Currently we have up to 14.5 million simultaneously active users:
-> https://store.steampowered.com/stats

If you extrapolate that ...

100/8,9 x 14,5 = 162,92

... one would no longer have to take 125 million users as a basis, but around 203 million. The Linux share in absolute numbers would then mean 1,583,400 Linux users on Steam.

Of course this is only based on assumptions. But there will be something true about these numbers.

This kind of error would be bigger, the smaller the percentage of linux is as more and more distros would fall in the black hole. Obviously it is present for more months and the miscalculation would be a lot bigger in our darkest oct-mar months.

> Distributions with less than a handful of users weren't getting factored into the total percentage.
> Boosted the numbers by several hundredths of a percent

My God, just how many distros are there? :O

When I accepted to take the survey, it stated my operating system as unknown. I use Manjaro KDE which steam doesn't recognize it as Linux!

With these rates we will have total world domination in no time. ;)

Imagine, in a year we'll be at 16.8%, and in two years we'll have a market share of over 470%!

Or maybe my math is a little off, that's a possibility too.

And Liam claimed the relevance can't be overstated. Clearly with a little effort it can be done! :D

There is definitely an impact on the Linux market share since Proton. I just hope this is not a statistical anomaly, as new Steam client installations have a pretty high probability to see the survey. So this could mean, lots of people are trying Steam on Linux now, and test if their games work with Proton... and maybe don't stick with Linux the month after. But from how I understand how the survey works, those people won't be counted the month after it again, as the survey should occur only once a year. Time will tell.

I think one of the big reasons is also the major decline in people playing PUBG. Look at the "Players every day" graph on [SteamDB](https://steamdb.info/app/578080/graphs/) and see how far it has fallen, which is big considering it was a game previously pushing the "simplified chinese" use up high. 3.2 million in January to around 1 million now.

Suggests the limitations for game developers of the sheer numbers of players (even if they're accurate, which I continue to doubt). I mean, if all those ex-PUBG players just washed right back out again as they stopped playing PUBG, most of them presumably never bought another game. So if I'm a game developer, all of them might as well never have existed--they're not going to buy my game. For developers, accurate stats of how much money was paid for games on the different platforms would be far more relevant--and of course on that score, Proton is very important because now a whole lot of sales of Windows-only games bought by Linux gamers to play on Linux, and even dual-booters previously to play on Windows, will now be showing as Linux sales.

On the accuracy of the stats--we still don't know the basic methodology, or even whether they're constantly changing it. We just know they occasionally find significant mistakes in it. That means we don't know whether it's even measuring the same thing over time, or how many significant mistakes are still in there, or even whether they keep introducing new ones.

Didn't they reveal that os share is calculated automatically and is independent of the surveys? Can we please stop complaining about survey frequency when it comes to market share?

maybe the wine users. maybe a lot of dual boot users, that tried all their windows games on linux

i would like to know how many downloads some games had in the past weeks.
i would say witcher 3 went crazy
and bethesda with doom, fallout, wolfenstein and skyrim too. do you think the publishers give a hoot about the numbers?

I've updated our dedicated page tracking it

Wow. I hadn't realised how much of a difference this revision made until I saw that. Truch be told, last month's “old” increase wasn't really all that much bigger than August's, although that was a pretty big jump too. But this really stretches it out.

What I don't think has been mentioned here, although it's clear from the chart, is that among English speakers the uptick over the last two months has been huge, almost doubling the Linux share. We're now comfortably over 2% in that (pretty large and important*) demographic. I don't know what the actual figures are these days, but that's getting close to what I think of as “Mac territory”.

*Apologies to speakers of other languages, but it's true.