

Linux Gamers Make Up ~2% Of Valve's Steam Users - velodrome
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMxNTQ

======
kibwen
Here are Steam's December Linux numbers that I recorded back in January:

    
    
      OS                         Share Delta
      Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit        0.29% +0.29%
      Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS 64 bit  0.26% +0.26%
      Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS         0.13% +0.13%
      Ubuntu 12.10               0.12% +0.12%
      Other                      0.71% +0.14%
    

Note that this was the first month that Linux use was recorded, which means
that the delta for "Other" is almost certainly entirely Linux (for example,
there was no "Linux Mint" option then).

Here's this month's numbers, for easy comparison:

    
    
      OS                          Share Delta
      Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit         0.71% +0.28%
      Ubuntu 12.10                0.38% +0.19%
      Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS 64 bit   0.31% +0.31%
      Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS          0.20% +0.20%
      Linux Mint 14 Nadia 64 bit  0.17% +0.17%
      Linux 64 bit                0.14% +0.14%
      Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS 64 bit   0.11% -0.22%
      Other                       0.82% +0.06%
    

BTW, if you're a Steam user on Linux, don't neglect to fill out the hardware
survey if you get selected. It really is an awesome resource for determining
the capabilities of the average gaming computer. There's also a handful of
_strange_ results... is Firefox really six times more popular than Chrome on
Windows? Are there really people still gaming on 640x480 monitors?

~~~
EduardoBautista
A lot of people who use Linux like to use open source just because it's open
source, and not particularly because it's better (anyone who says LibreOffice
is just as good as MS Office is crazy). That's why you see a lot more firefox
and chromium than you do on Windows or Mac.

~~~
jiggy2011
Well on Linux your only choice of (mainstream) browsers is firefox or
chrome/chromium so you would probably expect that.

Same with office.

~~~
yareally
And Opera. Pretty much anything other than IE and Safari.

------
dthunt
I'm actually really frustrated by Steam's linux port. If you're not running
Ubuntu it's freakishly inconvenient to get running.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not complaining that Steam doesn't have a gentoo
package that is maintained by them. I'm pissed off that they call apt-get
directly from the application, don't make it easy to discover steam's
requirements to run, have a confusing maze of launch scripts, and a bunch of
other major no-no's.

The ubuntu desktop is an easy access market, with some big upsides from
Steam's perspective. But there's a long history out there of vendors
successfully handling a broadly usable linux port without pulling this kind of
nonsense (attempting to maintain dependencies system-wide without even asking
if it's okay!), and a great number of linux users are happy to set
LD_LIBRARY_PATH and rebuild libpng or whatever for any special application
requirements if they're not running your 'officially supported' distribution.

That having been said, I'm playing Cave Story right now on linux.

~~~
ajasmin
It doesn't integrate that well in Ubuntu to start with. There's no app menu
integration for Unity.

Edit: I mean the unified menubar. Steam menubar is attached to the steam
window, not at the top of the screen.

~~~
zanny
Steam doesn't use a toolkit and overrides compositor decorations. It is never
intended to integrate, it doesn't integrate at all on Windows or Mac either.

------
dominicmauro
Valve was giving away a promotional item in Team Fortress 2 for users who
logged into the game from a Linux machine. The last time they did this, for
users who logged in from a Mac, the promotional item became a kind of in-game
de facto currency.

There were lots of users logging in once from an Ubuntu VM instance for the
item; it'll be interesting to see if this growth continues now that the item
giveaway is over.

For reference: <http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Tux>

~~~
stordoff
> The last time they did this, for users who logged in from a Mac, the
> promotional item became a kind of in-game de facto currency.

FWIW, this won't happen again, as the Tux items are not tradable.

~~~
philo23
They're likely to become tradable soon as the promotion is now over and other
promotional items become tradable after their promotion is over.

Still, I personally doubt they'll be worth much unlike the Ear Buds you got
from playing on a Mac purely because at the time trading didn't exist. So no
one went out of their way to get them, leaving only the people who actually
had Mac with them, making them highly sought after because there's only so
many of them. Not to mention it's outside of most peoples knowledge to run an
OS X virtual machine. While with this Linux item its been expected to be worth
a lot and making a Linux virtual machine is relatively a simple task, meaning
now there's a lot more Tux's to go around.

A similar thing to the Ear Buds also happened with a promotional item for "Sam
& Max: The Devil's Playhouse" in the past called "Max's Severed Head"
(<http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Max%27s_Severed_Head>) which rocketed in
price when trading became available due to the fact there's a limited amount
of them and they don't randomly drop while playing. They're currently worth
around 26 keys which is ~£50 if you buy the keys directly from the store, but
keys can be found cheaper and the price of course changes all the time.

------
bryanlarsen
Rather than the silly "doubling" headline, there's another number that's much
more interesting: that Linux users are 2% of steam users and OSX is 3%.
Compare those numbers with total share:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems).
OSX is at 7% and Linux at 1%.

It'll be really interesting to see where the Steam numbers end up when they
stabilize.

~~~
lazerwalker
What complicates matters is there's no good way of knowing how many Steam
"Windows" users are people who use OS X or Linux as their main OS but boot
into Windows to use Steam because of poor graphics card drivers.

~~~
rzendacott
Yup. I'm definitely included in this bunch. My graphics card (Nvidia Optimus)
doesn't work on Linux, so I'd much rather dual boot and game on Windows.

~~~
dbaupp
Have you tried Bumblebee? <http://bumblebee-project.org/> I've heard that
people get their Optimus cards to work well with it.

~~~
antihero
Yup, using Bumblebee with primus-run and CS:S runs perfectly smooth on my
laptop.

------
norswap
Relevant xkcd comic: <http://xkcd.com/605/>

~~~
sp332
I'm excited about this because I assumed all the people who wanted Steam on
Linux would download it immediately, leaving no room for growth in the second
month. The fact that it's still growing is a good sign.

------
antonios
Even better, I dare say that Steam's Linux market share has experienced
_infinite_ growth since February (where it was 0% exactly). Amazing, really.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It wasn't 0%, there are plenty of wine users.

------
dman
I hope that steam breaks the myth that Linux users will not pay for software.

~~~
networked
The Humble Bundle's statistics [1] have offered an argument against that
perception for a while. On average a Linux user pays $11.02 for a Humble
Bundle, while Windows users pay $5.93 and Mac users pay $8.43. Linux and Mac
users are also overrepresented among the Humble Bundle's buyers (having made
8% and 11% of the total number of purchases respectively) compared to the
gaming community at large.

That said, I'm not sure how widespread this myth really is outside of select
Internet communities. Enterprise Linux users are known to pay for their
software (even if somewhat indirectly, e.g., through support contracts), and
the biggest myth concerning desktop Linux users seems to be "huh, are there
any?".

[1] See <http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/humble/> for a great report.

~~~
recoiledsnake
That doesn't really tell us anything because Windows users have much more
choice as to where their gaming money goes compared to Linux users and Mac
users. Same goes with the overrepresentation.

~~~
onosendai
I don't think that was the OP's point. The conclusion that is usually drawn
from the myth that Linux users aren't willing to pay for software, is that
there isn't a viable market there. There clearly is, however, as the HIB has
demonstrated.

Even if you ignore the overrepresentation of Linux users, the fact stands that
when you look at total revenues, Linux rivals OS X.

~~~
lazerwalker
HIB definitely demonstrates that Linux users are willing to pay for software
(which is awesome!), but I'm not sure that there's enough data to use that to
conclude there's a viable market there.

We know that the HIB has drawn in significant revenue from Linux customers,
but that doesn't give us the faintest clue how profitable they are (remember,
that average $11 Linux sale has to be shared with multiple developers and
charities). You might take the fact that they keep offering more HIBs as a
sign that Humble Bundle (the company) considers its humble bundles (the
promotions) to be successes, but it's not a guarantee that the metric they're
using to define success is profitability. They've raised nearly $4.5 million
in funding, so they're not strapped for cash; it's very possible they're more
focused on using the bundles as a marketing channel than as an actual revenue
stream, convincing consumers to trust the Humble Bundle brand name and
developers/publishers that they're a meaningful distribution platform.

tl;dr: the fact that a successful venture-funded startup is selling software
to Linux users, when we don't know if they're profitable or what their long-
term strategy is, doesn't necessarily imply that there's a viable market for
selling software to Linux users.

------
saosebastiao
As someone who has absolutely zero interest in gaming, this is the most
exciting news I have read on HN for a good month or so.

------
forrestthewoods
Meh. The one and only question that matters is "how many Linux users would buy
my game that would not have bought it on either OS X or Windows". That number
is significantly smaller than 2%.

I'm very excited at the prospects of SteamBox and can't wait to learn more.
I'm not sure Steam on desktop linux will ever be meaningful.

I do wonder what happens if Steambox comes out with some flavor of Linux
included but installing Windows grants an automatic 20% performance increase
due to drivers. Hell, I'd install Windows even if it were only a 5% increase.

~~~
optymizer
Wasn't there a post form Valve that showed they can already get 20%
improvement on Linux? Given that they're also working to improve the graphics
drivers for Linux, I don't really see where that "automatic 20% performance
increase" for Windows would come from. Sure, the driver itself might be 20%
slower, but the Linux stack is already faster than the Windows stack AND there
is room for improvement.

------
anoncow
More games please. Many of the bundle games are also not available.

~~~
s_kilk
My recommendation for the day is Kentucky Route Zero. It runs beautifully on
my mid-range Ubuntu laptop and frankly it has been one of the most astounding
gaming experiences I've ever had.

~~~
jebblue
I was thinking of trying that and Serious Sam 3. CS Source and TF2 have run
great!

------
frozenport
What percentage of Linux gamers are also Windows gamers?

If P(Linux | Windows) = 1.0, we know steam grew operating complexity instead
of business.

~~~
_casperc
The way I understand it is that they are making an investment in Linux to
allow their upcoming steam box to run Linux.

Also it allows (or will allow) users to avoid using Windows just to be able to
play games. This is a good thing all around.

------
YokoZar
There have been a few occasion's where I've managed to pry the number of Wine
users out of Valve over the years -- the Linux usage numbers look fairly
similar.

Unfortunately, there was a period of about a year or two where the hardware
survey would crash under Wine, so the data is probably very biased against
Wine users (even I learned not to opt in).

------
cabirum
Most of these are VMs to get a new TF2 hat, anyway.

------
speeder
I expect this to increase.easier than OSX because OSX machines are inherently
expensive.

Also I know many persons that don't used Linux only because there was no steam
for it.

~~~
officemonkey
As a long-time Steam user on OSX (I have the TF2 earbuds to prove it,) the
games available on OSX and Linux are a paltry offering (one of the top selling
games right now on OSX is "Left 4 Dead 2" released in 2009.)

There are few top-tier games. Borderlands 2 is the only recent game that comes
to mind. It became so discouraging that I built a PC gaming machine. I hope
for a day where I can buy new games on an OSX or Linux machine, but I do not
plan on holding my breath.

~~~
stusmall
The part that kills me about Borderlands 2 on OSX is when they finally
released it you can't play with your character from steam... you haven't to
make a new one.

------
Nican
I am curios to see what version of OpenGL people have.

~~~
frozenport
server glx vendor string: SGI

server glx version string: 1.4

------
nirvana
Steam's support on OS X is the suck. I don't know what the experience is like
on Linux, but given there is less competition from better stores on Linux I
wouldn't be surprised to see Steam be a big hit on Linux.

As for me, after being a steam user for years, but given the fact that I
haven't been able to play team fortress for 5 months now despite playing it
for years, in the future, I'll use the Mac App Store.

~~~
lreeves
What do you find problematic on the Mac version? My office has weekly TF2
games and a bunch of us use Steam on OSX. The only gripe I have is that it
doesn't remember my password, but other than that it seems pretty much
identical to the Windows counterpart.

~~~
brigade
Personally, I'm impressed by how horribly implemented Steam's OS X gamepad
support is. That takes skill to do, when other apps Just Work™.

Also, Steam.app used to suck heaps of CPU just idling in the background, often
enough that to make the fan audible in laptops. That improved lately, but
still isn't perfect.

Not to mention the frequent crashes when you quit. I guess it's quitting
either way, but still.

