Linux Gamers Demolish Steam Hardware Survey

the monthly steam hardware survey gives us some interesting insights into the way that people actually play their games now obviously steam isn't the only marketplace out there but a lot of the insights that come from this survey do certainly apply to other stores things like how amd cpus are slowly but surely growing in popularity and along with that you're starting to see a rise in the number of cores that people have in their cpu and somehow windows 7 still makes up five percent of the market share even though microsoft is no longer supporting it and you really should not be running the operating system if it is connected to the internet at all but that's not what i want to focus on today what i want to talk about instead is linux now linux has always been a very small part of the same market share and for the past three months it has been above one percent currently sitting at 1.05 percent now if it was just this you know slight raise i would not really care about this but i'll get into why i care in just a bit let's put this one percent into perspective because one percent does not really sound like that many people especially compared to the market share that windows has but currently steam has over a billion accounts but the number of total accounts doesn't really matter because only a fraction of these accounts are actually active so looking instead at monthly active users steam sits around 120 million so 1.5 of that would be about 1.26 million monthly active linux users that is a lot of people that is genuinely a lot of people and it's kind of interesting to see the way the distros are actually split up so there's something slightly uh disingenuous about the numbers ubuntu is split into different ubuntu version numbers so even though it says it is 0.16 percent for 20.04.3 it's actually uh 0.23 if you also include 21.04 the same thing is done with linux mint as well i presume linux mint's number is actually a little bit higher than this but either way ubuntu makes up 0.23 of the market share manjaro at 0.14 and then arch linux somehow is 0.12 beating out things like mint i play games in arch linux it's honestly not that difficult obviously setting up arch and doing all that stuff can be difficult and time consuming but if you're already using arch and you want to play games there's really no reason you can't go and do that now the one percent isn't what i am most interested in some people will say things like the first one is the hardest but that doesn't make any sense to me i don't think anyone is judging whether they adopt something based on hitting that one percent mark there is some credibility to be given to things like the adoption curve where there exists a chasm between the early adopters and the early majority where going from that group to the other becomes incredibly difficult but something like that is outside my area of expertise what i am way more interested in isn't the fact that we're at one percent it's the fact that this number has been slowly going up over time obviously there have been dips here and there because the user base is still relatively small any randomization of the statistics gathering can sort of really skew that number but over a long enough period we can see this is still trending upwards so this data set begins in september 2018. that is a very important date that is about a month or so after the original version of proton was released before that point linux didn't really do much i've looked at the older numbers going back like 2015 and it's basically always at 0.8 or slightly above it it really never did anything besides that proton was where everything changed proton launched with basically no game supported at least officially there were a lot of other games that if you did some tweaking you could at least get running but over these three years proton has gone from being it kinda does stuff sometimes to being you can basically play whatever you want sure there are certainly a lot of games that don't work and we can talk about those all day but there is so much stuff that does work that if you just do a little bit of research you are more than capable of playing most games under linux now as for this latest growth point this happened after july now that is a very important month because that was the month the steam deck was announced and the pre-orders were opened up so i feel like there were a lot of people and this can be sort of identified by going anywhere that talks about gaming that haven't really looked at linux gaming since like the steam machines came out and think that gaming on linux really still cannot be done this basically put all of this attention on to linux gaming and the way that i see this is there's a lot of people decided hey i'm gonna just try out gaming on linux and seeing what it's like if valve is releasing another bit of hardware and saying hey all of these games are going to work maybe it's not as bad as i thought it was that seems to be what is happening here plus combine that with all of the attention that massive youtube channels like say linus tech tips have been given to things like linux gaming and the steam deck especially now with linus's uh new linux gaming challenge someone is bound to go and try it out obviously not everyone is going to like it but seeing as though this number is still going up after a couple of months there is obviously some people that are actually sticking around where i think this is going to get very interesting is come january february time giving enough time for the steam decks to actually ship out and for hardware surveys to actually get done and then following each month after the next quarterly releases because currently the steam deck is only going to release like every three months because they got so many orders for them i don't know what's going to happen to this chart we don't actually know how many steam decks have been pre-ordered all we know about the steam deck sales is in the first 24 hours due to a bug with the website people managed to work out there was a hundred thousand pre-orders gabe newell expects there to be millions of sales but let's just be super conservative and say there is 1 million steam deck sales i will be really surprised if it only sells a million units i wouldn't be surprised if it sold like two or three that would be almost doubling the linux steam market share and sure if we look at a list of console sales that wouldn't even put it in the top 30. it would be placed around the color tv game the intellivision the n gauge and a bit above the nes classic edition that's not the original nes that was a a re-release of the nes with like some emulators running on it so it wouldn't be like one of the most selling consoles ever but when your market share already sits at like 1 million users an extra million users is a lot of extra people and that puts a lot more eyes onto the world of linux gaming i don't know how many units the steam deck is going to sell but as long as it isn't like a commercial failure which i find very unlikely to believe it's going to be interesting to see what happens with linux gaming over the next couple of years i know that some people believe that everyone is just going to install windows on the steam deck but i think you underestimate the level of laziness that people have when it comes to the hardware they own so how many people do you know that go and jailbreak a switch how many people do you know that go and modern xbox 360 your modern xbox one my guess is probably maybe one or two people and that's because most people is gonna treat it like a console and treat it like this enclosed piece of hardware one thing to keep in mind when looking at this data is that surveying is not a perfect method so you'll see these like raises and dips from month to month but that doesn't necessarily mean that there actually was a change in the number of users it's just that surveying can lead to some partially inaccurate results so the way that valve collects the hardware data is they don't just go and automatically collect from every single user if they did that that would give them basically a perfect representation but it has some problems firstly that is a lot of data and secondly it is a massive massive privacy violation so they also don't just do an opt-in survey where they would let everyone do it the problem with just having a fully opt-in survey is that is going to have selection bias where the people who are actually interested in telling valve about their hardware are going to be the ones that go and tell valve so you'd see a much much larger amount of people on linux you'd see a much larger range of people with like high-end gpus which wouldn't really be a accurate representation of the real landscape of steam so what they do instead is they have a randomly selected opt-in survey this is to avoid that selection bias while allowing people to decide whether they actually want to send their data there is still going to be some level of selection bias with it being opt-in but being randomly selected it is going to be minimized i have absolutely no idea what the future for linux gaming actually holds but now the proton exists even if valve decides hey we don't really care about linux anymore we're just gonna drop support and stop working on proton seeing as though proton is being developed as an open source project people are always going to keep working this even if one day that does happen and the market share drops a bit proton is going to keep being worked on and i'm probably just going to keep playing on linux when that stops being possible sure then i'll stop then but as it stands as it keeps getting better i am really excited to welcome all the new people to linux and say hey if you want to play your games check out proton db check out lutrus and i'm sure you'll be able to get most things working and if you're not just new to linux gaming you're new to linux in general welcome to my channel i use arch by the way it's actually not that difficult it's just very time consuming i wouldn't really recommend it for most people if you like this video and you want to support this channel and become one of these amazing people over here please do check out my patreon subscribers only bear pay linked in the description down below i've got a podcast called tech over t available basically anywhere i've got a gaming channel called brewery ops and plays for a live stream twice a week upload about five or so youtube shorts and this channel is also available over on odyssey that's gonna be it for me and i'm out [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Brodie Robertson

Views: 5,412

Rating: 4.9707317 out of 5

Keywords: brodie robertson, linux, linux gaming, gaming on linux, steam, steam hardware survey, brodie robertson linux, arch linux, steam hardware survey linux, linux steam hardware survey, proton, how to game on linux, proton linux, linux proton, linux proton gaming, linux 1%, steam hardware survey linux 1%, linux 1% steam hardware survey, arch linux gaming, gaming arch linux, linux steam, steam linux, linux gaming steam, steam linux gaming

Id: Jw3Nsy61He0

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 06 2021