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Steam Linux Usage Dropped Slightly In January

While Steam had some great game deals over the holidays and titles like the Metro Redux games are fresh to Linux, these events didn't do anything to boost the Steam Linux market-share with the reported percentage of Linux gamers contracting slightly during January.

The January 2015 Steam Survey numbers are now available and they show the total Linux marketshare at 1.09%, which is down by 0.01% month-over-month. Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS and Linux Mint 17 Qiana lost ground while Ubuntu 14.10, Arch Linux (Linux 3.10), and Linux Mint 17.1 were used more slightly given they're the newer versions of the Linux distributions that lost ground.

Meanwhile for January 2015 the Windows marketshare on Steam was at 95.48%, an increase of 0.05%. The OS X marketshare for last month was at 3.32%.

Overall the results aren't much of a surprise given that SteamOS / Steam Machines aren't yet widely available, there's no exciting Linux game exclusives, nor is there any other new reason to convert Windows gamers into Linux users. At least next month at GDC we'll hopefully find out the real state of Steam Machines along with next-generation OpenGL. Until something major happens, I wouldn't expect the Linux gaming market-share to rise much beyond 1.0%. While the Linux-based SteamOS and Steam Machines may not be too far away, Linux will also face much greater pressure going forward with Microsoft's major work on Windows 10 that so far is receiving fairly favorable comments.

All the numbers for the updated Steam Survey can be found via SteamPowered.com.