As it turns out, the Linux market share reported in the hardware survey for September was higher than initially reported.
Writing on Twitter, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais said this:
Just fixed a small rounding error in the HW survey that was affecting reported Linux usage. Distributions with less than a handful of users weren't getting factored into the total percentage. Numbers for September have just been updated: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
With those fresh numbers, this means the Linux share for September was actually 0.78% not 0.71%. The recent figures now also show Windows dropping down to 96.29%. While that's a relatively small addition, it's still good to have it be more accurate.
I've updated our dedicated page tracking it, which shows that Linux is now hitting a 16 month high in terms of Steam market share. I don't think the relevance of that can be overstated, considering another 0.15% would put us back to a level we were at in September of 2016. Although, we would have a lot more users considering the ever-increasing growth of Steam.
One thing to be clear on though, is that we have no idea how long this error has been around. Meaning it could have affected months or years worth of data.
This isn't the first time there's been a flaw in the survey, like the time Valve was essentially over-counting cyber cafe customers.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
-> 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.
> Boosted the numbers by several hundredths of a percent
My God, just how many distros are there? :O
Quoting: YoRHa-2BAnd Liam claimed the relevance can't be overstated. Clearly with a little effort it can be done! :DQuoting: LinasWith 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.
Quoting: liamdaweSuggests 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.Quoting: CorbenThere 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.
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.
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?
QuoteI've updated our dedicated page tracking itWow. 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.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me