According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That’s a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months… It’s also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been.
Data from Valve: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=combined
Previous 12 months:
June 2023: -0.03%
May 2023: +0.15%
April 2023: +0.48%
March 2023: -0.43%
February 2023: -0.11%
January 2023: no difference
December 2023: -0.06%
November 2022: +0.16%
October 2022: +0.05%
September 2022: -0.04%
August 2022: +0.04%
July 2022: +0.05%
It would seem Linux among Steam users shows a growth tendency.
Hopefully this tendency keeps going strong!
What happened in April and March?
looks like what happened was that A LOT of Chinese users entered the data which caused windows to go up significantly and linux to drop off slightly
But how does that explain the huge increase the month before? It would need to have a lot of user using Linux for a bit and then stop using it after
Looks like it was around the end of March when Valve announced the date they’d end support for Win7 and Win8. So perhaps a part of the Windows userbase went to Linux. If for fear, as a final push to drop Windows, etc., I don’t know, but perhaps they may have influenced.
These wild swings don’t make me very inclined to trust steam numbers