Valve's Steam Survey Shows Linux Gaming Fall To One Of The Lowest Levels Ever

With the start of the new month comes the updated Steam Hardware/Software Survey statistics, and what we always pay attention to is their reported Linux market-share.

Of course, many feel that the Steam Survey is biased, rarely seen by Linux users, etc, etc, but nevertheless it's one of the few public signals about the overall Linux gaming marketshare via Steam. The Steam Survey also still isn't showing up to SteamOS / Steam Big Picture users, but I doubt that would really impact the results too much yet. Nevertheless, take the numbers as you wish to interpret them.

The May 2016 stats from Valve show the Steam Linux marketshare falling by another 0.06%, or down to 0.84%. For May last year, the market-share was at 0.88% while last month was obviously at 0.90%.

From my glancing through past Phoronix articles on the topic, this appears to be the lowest level of the Linux OS usage in more than the past 12 months and certainly well below what we saw in 2014 when it tended to be above 1.0%. From my old data, I have yet to find a month that was less than 0.84%. Of course, it's a on a percentage basis and Steam still seems to be continuing to grow, but the Linux numbers aren't keeping pace with Windows/OSX.

The indicated OS X usage for May was 3.67% and Windows was at 95.39%.

So again, take the data as you wish, and if you are interested can learn more from SteamPowered.com. Meanwhile, the Steam Store Linux games indicate roughly 2,100 titles are available (or will be soon) while Windows is at more than 8,600 and OS X at around 3,200.