Linux Gaming on Steam increased to 0.8% of the total player base in the month of August 2019. The new data comes after the gaming client, Steam, released its survey for August.
A lot of other data including the most popular OS, GPU and CPU were also revealed during the survey.
Linux Gaming On Steam
Linux Gaming saw a 0.01% increase from the month of July. The data from the previous month usually ranged from 0.75% to 0.8% after it finally settled down to 0.8%.
Beside with the Linux gaming user base, several other interesting data was also revealed during the survey. The favorite Linux based OS for gaming on Steam came out to be Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS 64 bit, acquiring a 15.99% of the total share. The second position was occupied by Ubuntu 19.04 64 bit with a share of 11.08%, while the Manjaro Linux 64 bit was in the third spot.
The most used GPU by Linux users was the Nvidia GTX 1060; its share among the gamers also increased by 0.64%. This increase could be credited to the launch of the Nvidia GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti, which replaced the older 1060 and brought down its prices in the process. The Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti is supposed to be as powerful as the GTX 1070 and also relatively affordable.
The mere increase in the player base of Linux might not seem impressive upfront but on a year-on-year percentage basis, this increase is significant. In August 2018, the player base was a mere 0.58% and now it is 0.22% more at 0.8%. The rise in the player base can also be credited with the release of Steam Play, which allowed a number of Windows games to be playable on Linux. Several developers also work really hard to make sure that popular games like DOOM and Borderlands 2 run natively on Linux without the need of any API like WINE. The number of native Linux games keeps increasing every month.
According to the trend, the player base is growing steadily and will reach the 1% mark very soon. Furthermore, we also need to remember that Steam surveys are based on data reported by the user. So it is possible that the Linux gaming on Steam might already be at 1% player base but it is not reported by the players.
Recently, several gamer-friendly changes have been made. Only a few weeks ago, Nvidia released a bunch of hardware documents of its GPUs to facilitate the open-source driver development on Linux. You can read the entire Steam Survey for August 2019 here.
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