I'm getting pretty tired of seeing these posts every five minutes from the same couple of sites.
Statistics have variance, especially when they're recorded from voluntary surveys, please get over it.
this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
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I’m getting pretty tired of seeing these posts every five minutes from the same couple of sites.
Statistics have variance, especially when they’re recorded from voluntary surveys, please get over it.
Currently Valve is the only billion dollar company who invest in Linux gaming industry.
...incidentally is basically the only billion dollar PC company who invest in PC gaming and don't have any kind of conflict of interest with Console (Microsoft's Xbox? any major AAA game company who also publish/make exclusives to console? Epic Games's Fortinite earning is 48% Playstation, 27% Xbox and remaining 18% for Nintendo Switch/Android/PC)
So, yeah, the earning on the only billion dollar company who is 100% all in in the PC gaming industry matter: those stats matter for Valve, at the very least.
Yeah the stats matter and Linux matters to valve, but OP's point was that the monthly voluntary surveys have a lot of variance and are of limited value except for trends. So people saying "oh it's gone up this month" or "down this month" is nonsense and a total lack of understanding of statistics and the nature of the data.
Valve however has much more data to play with - it has the original dataset which matches all the answers together, and can also cross reference it with all the other data it holds for it's users. So Valve will know much more accurately what is going on; they'd never release the rest of their data as it's commercially very valuable.
The limited dataset they do release is aggregate data, and from the survey only. It's interesting but very limited - ok for rough trends, but not much else.
I do agree that monthly voluntary surveys is not an exceptional way for the general audience to have a clear idea on things are going on, but my point is less about the general audience and the responsibility weight Valve itself sit onto.
We can endlessly speculate on the secret/true data Valve is hiding from the general public, but in fact, only the actual public data affect their business: that's where publisher and developers make the strategic choices on which platform (OS) and hardware (VR HMD, highend GPU...) to support. Any incorrect or nonfactual data would lead to less sales, and less happy developer/publisher/customers.
Yes, of course Valve does have it's own "secret recipient data" they don't share... but I think the secret data is used more as sort of control on those who try to cheat the stats.
Sometime simplified Chinese language goes on top, resulting English language as secondary for the whole platform... quite often Valve fix those stats, no doubt by cross referencing their secret sauce.
That's how most modern anticheat in videogames works: the data is keep secret, until one special day you get one big wave that flush all them at once (if you throw constantly daily updated data on which kind of cheater you caught... the cheater got a precious feedback they can play onto)
The significance of the number is not that it "lost 0.8%", it's that this month's number is like last month's well above the previous trend line, making the record high look that much more like a meaningful change and not just a random fluctuation.
The data is still noisy month-to-month and just how meaningful it is remains unclear, but this data point is nothing but good news for linux market share and framing it as somehow the opposite is misleading.
aren't these numbers generally wonky to begin with? like wasn't it determined that the increase a couple months back was due to the Chinese New Year where people in China got like a week off work and school and thus spent time in internet cafes which run linux and therefore saw a massive increase?
a drop of less than 1 percent probably isn't a big deal.
No, it was the other way around. Because of the massive influx of Chinese users, the Linux share dropped from ~3% to ~2%, because they basically all use Windows over there (for gaming). Then after the Chinese users were removed or accounted for (or whatever Valve does), Linux jumped to the record 5.3% last month.
We knew this would happen. I'm surprised its still over 4%. Also finally the mysterious 64-bit and 0 64-bit resolved into proper distributions. It's not Flatpak after all, as I was speculating before. What happened there?
Man the Steam statistics is like having an argument with your wife, winning some arguments, then losing a big chunk for no reason, then one slap after another. I don't know what is left and right anymore (no this is not a political statement). In plain English: I can't take the Steam statistics (specifically about Linux market share) seriously.
The power of Windows!