Steam Linux Use Ticks Back Just Under 1% For Starting 2021

Written by Michael Larabel in Valve on 1 February 2021 at 08:23 PM EST. 22 Comments
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With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey figures out of Valve for the month prior. For January 2021 there is an increase in the Linux gaming percentage as it gets back to flirting with the 1% mark.

For December 2020 the initial Steam Survey results pointed to a huge dip of 0.33% going down to 0.57% compared to November's 0.9%. A few days later it was then revised to 0.74% or a drop of 0.16% compared to November.

For January 2021, the fresh numbers point to seeing an uptick of 0.13% compared to December. In other words, back up to 0.91% or roughly where it was at in November for percentage terms. There's likely been many more Steam users active over the past two months especially with the holidays, so on an absolute basis might be higher at this stage.

During January, macOS saw a 0.62% marketshare gain to 3.44% while Windows was at 95.65%. It's refreshing to see it back up in the 0.8~0.9% range where Steam on Linux was at for much of 2020, but yet to crack the 1.0% threshold compared to the early days of Steam on Linux. We'll see in 2021 if that 1.0% threshold is breached considering the continued successes of Steam Play and now thanks to VKD3D-Proton many Direct3D 12 games beginning to run gracefully on Linux. Ultimately though unless Steam Machines return or some other compelling reason to get Windows gamers migrating to Linux, there is unlikely to be any very significant shift in the market-share.

When looking at the survey results for Linux it shows AMD continuing to widdle away at Intel's CPU market dominance, Radeon Polaris GPUs still being quite popular and the GeForce GTX 1060, and 1080p gaming still going strong.

What do you hope to see out of Linux gaming in 2021? Let us know in the forums.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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