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Valve Reveals First Month of Steam Linux Gains 295

An anonymous reader writes with news that Valve has updated its Hardware & Software Survey for December 2012, which reflects the first month of the platform being available for Linux. Even though the project is still in a beta test, players on Ubuntu already account for 0.8% of Steam usage. The 64-bit clients for Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04.1 showed about double the share of the 32-bit versions. MacOS use also showed growth, rising to about 3.7%. Windows 7's usage share dropped by over 2%, but balanced by the growth of Windows 8, which is now at just under 7%. The total share for Windows is still about 95%.
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Valve Reveals First Month of Steam Linux Gains

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  • Wine (Score:4, Interesting)

    by simonbp ( 412489 ) on Saturday January 05, 2013 @11:44AM (#42488197) Homepage

    I wonder how many of the "Windows" users are actually just Linux users using Wine. Despite the Beta, I still do that for games (e.g. Civ 5) that don't have a Linux version.

    • There are likely a fair number like me that don't have a machine with a decent graphics card because of the lack of games in general. My primary laptop just won't cut it for Steam. Now that Steam is out for Linux, my next one will.

      • Re:Wine (Score:4, Interesting)

        by MoonFog ( 586818 ) on Saturday January 05, 2013 @11:54AM (#42488267)
        This is what I find to the gold mine in Steam; the small, non-resource hungry, indie games. They are often far more interesting to play than the latest CoD++, and Steam makes them easy to find and play.
        • They tend to be a lot better value than the high end games, too. I don't really feel all that bad if I spent $10 on an indie title and it turns out to be a dud, but if I spent $60 on a top tier title and it ends up sucking, there'll be hell to pay. And for *most* of the indie games on Steam, $10 is on the high end of pricing. A lot of the indie games on Steam are well worth the price they're charging, and then some.

    • by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Saturday January 05, 2013 @12:06PM (#42488351)

      That's a very good point made by the parent, and it has plenty of precedent outside of the Valve/Steam games space. I appear in the statistics as a "Windows User" for Guild Wars 2 (and for many years previously for Guild Wars 1), yet there hasn't been a Windows box at home for years and years. This is sure to be happening for Steam "Windows" games as well.

      Wine works perfectly for gaming these days. Beware the "Windows User" statistics!

    • Certainly I count for at least one. Even though I have the Steam Linux client installed to play a few games I have the Windows client installed under WINE to play the rest that aren't available. The only thing that might help them account for it is that I do see a reference to wine in the hardware information I submit when it randomly asks for it, so it is entirely possible they are able to account for this... whether they do or not is another story.
    • Probably a dozen.
    • by laffer1 ( 701823 )

      I'm planning on setting up a linux install once the steam port matures a bit more. I have a Mac and PC and use the latter mostly for gaming and BSD development. Being able to game without windows would be great. I recently went from a Mac Pro to a Mac mini because I gave up on Mac gaming after trying to get it to work for years. It's just much better and cheaper on a PC. Without having to buy a windows license in the future, I can save even more money on my PC. Windows is $100.. that could go to a fast

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 05, 2013 @12:44PM (#42488625)

    You can spend all your time fighting extraordinarily un-restraining DRM, or you can play games.
    Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth. From the numbers, having Steam support linux games at all is pretty silly from the business perspective.
    It's an act of good will that it exists at all.

    So, keep complaining, if you think that's getting you anywhere. I'm going back to playing games

    • From the numbers, having Steam support linux games at all is pretty silly from the business perspective.

      Steam is supporting games *from* a business perspective. Its very existence is being threatened. In future steam may only exist OS X and Linux. Its mistake was not expecting this sooner, and not supporting Linux earlier. The reality is Windows is going to be overtaken by Android this year...it actually makes sense to produce games for Linux first, and cross platform is a must in today's new world.

      I buy a large number of games, most are cross-platform; DRM free and pretty cheap. I don't use steam because of

    • You can spend all your time fighting extraordinarily un-restraining DRM, or you can play games.

      Or I can play games and not use Steam. Not all games require Steam or even have DRM, you know.

      Also, I don't think that "it's not as bad as other DRM" is a good argument.

  • It's 'ok' (Score:4, Informative)

    by __aaqvdr516 ( 975138 ) on Saturday January 05, 2013 @12:54PM (#42488707)

    The Steam client itself works just fine. The problem is Valve's distribution system. I had 4 games that were listed as supported. Of those, two of them would not install (as in you can click the install button and it would give a message that it was installed but there would be nothing downloaded). One of them installed but would not launch. The last is TF2, and I really don't care to play that.

    I'm not faulting them, it's still beta after all. I'm just not excited about a new platform to play games that are mostly available outside of Steam already with the added bonus of more TF2.

  • Why is it that they fix the case sensitive issue (I assume, since Linux is case sensitive by default) for Linux, but the Mac client still refuses to work on a case sensistive volume?

    WHAT THE FUCK?

    I could ramble on about how you actively have to do something stupid to not support case sensitive, but I'll leave that for another day.

    • Valve MUST make Linux a viable gamming plataform, or they are out of the game.

      That said, they get the same result whatever market share Linux gets. The reason they must run on Linux is not because everybody will sudenly switch, it is because they can use it to threaten Microsoft in the case MS extends their PC monopoly into the game distribution market.

      The Mac simply doesn't enable such kind of "deal".

  • A reminder for all that although Ubuntu is the only one on the list, you can run it on other platforms.

    Valve has native binaries for Gentoo, SUSE, Fedora, and Arch
    You can read more here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux [valvesoftware.com]


    On a personal note, while extremely happy that linux is finally gaining gaming ground, it sorrows me that they decided to put emphasis on Ubuntu, given its current questionable vision

"Yes, and I feel bad about rendering their useless carci into dogfood..." -- Badger comics

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