Steam Survey Reports The Latest Linux Gaming Marketshare For October

October was very interesting for Linux gaming with no AAA native game ports released but a heck of a lot more Windows games are now running nicely on Linux thanks to Steam Play / Proton / DXVK. So it's quite interesting to see Valve's just-published monthly Steam Survey results for the month prior.

According to ProtonDB, more than 2,700 Windows games are reported to be working with Steam Play via the Steam client on Linux... Of course, for best results to be using the Steam beta / Proton beta and also the very latest Radeon / NVIDIA graphics drivers.

Interesting times with Steam Play and given its maturity and significant improvements with Wednesday's big update, I'll be working on checking out some benchmark-friendly Proton games over the weekend for GPU benchmarking... Looking ahead to November is also the likely Total War: WARHAMMER II Linux game port thanks to Feral and surely more Linux GPU driver milestones and hopefully more on the Proton/DXVK front. Valve's Artifact game is also being released at the end of November.

Anyhow, Valve's Steam Survey puts the Linux gaming marketshare for October 2018 at 0.72%, which is surprisingly unchanged in the grand scheme given the Steam Play advancements. Valve's numbers today show 0.72% for Linux, which they report as a 0.05% increase over the month prior.

But last month for September's numbers they originally reported 0.71% only to days later revise it to 0.78%, a big jump up already thanks to Steam Play. That was also the largest Linux gaming marketshare on a percentage basis in more than one year.

Now that 0.72% is reported for October as a 0.05% increase, it looks like they may have revised lower the Linux percentage for September. In any case, 0.05% is largely flat and not too statistically significant in this case.

This doesn't mean that Steam Play didn't help for October in converting more gamers to Linux, as the overall Steam user-base is likely still growing a great deal each month... This just means that the Linux gaming population is keeping up with the expansion rate of Steam overall. Unfortunately absolute numbers are hard to come by for Steam.

Windows meanwhile came in at 96.44% and macOS at 2.84%. The data can be viewed here.