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Steam hits a new all-time high for users online, Linux share rises

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Two quick bits of Steam news to cover this wonderful Monday morning. As expected, Steam does still appear to be growing.

SteamDB made a Twitter post yesterday to note that the previous historic concurrent user count on Steam set back in January 2018 of 18,537,490 was smashed to a new record of 18,801,944 online. A huge number of people of course but plenty are likely to be bots. What's interesting, is that against the same previous record, this year there were less people actually in-game. In January 2018 there were around 7 million in-game while this year with the new concurrent record only about 6 million were in-game.

While we're on the subject of Steam, their monthly Hardware Survey went out again and it showed Linux had risen to 0.9%. Going by our dedicated Steam Tracker, that's the highest it's been for at least 16 months now.

All good news as Valve continue putting resources into improving Linux gaming through funding graphics driver improvements for AMD, the new Container system, funding DXVK+Wine development for Proton, this new Gamescope and likely more to come still. We still need to find out what Steam Cloud Gaming is (#1, #2) which could see a reveal later this year perhaps.

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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anewson Feb 4, 2020
Quoting: MaathSo, what are the 12.5 million doing? Sifting through the morass trying to find a game to play? Or is it, if you have your Steam client open, you are a concurrent user?

Oh god it's turning into Netflix! Our steam libraries have hit critical mass and our predators' eyes can't lock in on any one game to single it out from the herd

EDIT: BTW I also got the survey but it didn't recognize Manjaro ('Unknown operating system')


Last edited by anewson on 4 February 2020 at 1:15 am UTC
g000h Feb 4, 2020
For some reason, the caption for this article made me think of this:

All Time High

Enjoy :)
jens Feb 4, 2020
  • Supporter
Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: jensNice to see that the Linux numbers seem to normalize.
Surely no coincidence with the decrease of Chinese users ;)
Yeah, noticed that. Still, even with that decline the total Steam numbers seem to be rising anyway, so some of that rise has to be new Linux users.

Yes, sure. My post wasn't meant that sarcastic.
It seems that the big jumps in both directions are cause by Chinese users joining or leaving Windows. Though in-between Linux usage is relatively pretty much the same the past years, meaning new Linux users are joining Steam similar as new Windows users. Granted, only 1 of 50 new users seems to be a new Linux user (assuming 2%), but still...
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