I reckon this analysis would benefit from absolute figures. A drop in market share doesn't necessarily mean less users if said market is experiencing a massive growth.
I don’t think anyone who understands market share thinks that a drop in market share means fewer users. But it does mean that your product has stagnated and commercial interests are going to be focusing their energy elsewhere where it can have a more outsized ROI.
A constant market share as the pie grows is great - it means your attractiveness as a platform is keeping up with overall growth. If someone needs a 2% growth to edge out competition, targeting Linux could be valuable. A shrinking market share means I should invest elsewhere. Linux has remained niche because you need to get about 5-10% to warrant commercial interests because there’s a non 0 cost porting to Linux and providing some level of support. Also your potential customers have to spend money which is less clear from these numbers who the Linux community fares vs others. For example iOS customers tend to be more valuable than android because they are typically higher income, there’s a lot of them in terms of market share and absolute numbers and spend more money on the App Store / in app than the typical android user.
As a SD owner, it's only a "better" version of the Switch through the eyes of Gamers. It's heftier, more expensive, has worse battery life, a worse screen, doesn't have the dock included, and doesn't have Nintendo's back catalog. The average person buying the Switch isn't looking to buy a Linux PC that may or may not support PC games; they want simplicity.
Gaming as a whole is almost entirely multi platform these days, aside from a few first party published titles.
Anything playable on MacOS also works on windows. Most mid budget indie games on Windows also have switch ports. Bigger budget ones have PS5 versions. We’re at a point where you just buy what suits your budget and if there’s one exclusive that you want.
It’s not like the Genesis vs the SNES where the libraries were almost entirely different and games were designed with that hardware’s unique strengths in mind.
Linux’s main path to gaming success is being a cheaper, less annoying version of Windows.
Yeah, it's hard to emphasize this enough - the Deck is absolutely huge. Photos and videos do not do justice to how huge it is. It takes up as much vertical space in a backpack as a small laptop does, and (with its case) it's much thicker than a laptop. I bought one and ended up returning it because I simply couldn't see myself ever taking it out of the house.
Steam Deck is great device but it saddens me that it has a very poor game catalogue for kids (~5 years). Either the games are not there or it is very hard to find them on Steam. I wish they introduced some separate section, similarly as Netflix or Youtube Kids to solve this issue.
Obviously Nintendo and mobile phones have that sorted.
A "couch co-op" section would be great for kids and adults (the existing "co-op" section has Eldin Ring as #1...) in a docked or traditional console setting. My kids love Overcooked, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, etc. This maps to how our family uses our Switch as well. It's rare for my kids to use the Switch as a portable handheld.
To me, SD's incredibly wide compatibility has a ton of appeal to my kids. Java Minecraft with mods in a portable Switch form factor? Hell yes!
Under Narrow by number of players there's a Shared/Split Screen Co-op option. Just looking at it, the ones I'm familiar with are all couch co-op type games.
Alas the pickings are just pretty slim on PC. Overcooked, Railed, Plates Up... some others. It saddens me significantly how PC gaming has gotten more and more and more 1 player 1 computer.
I also would love to see more Remote Play Together games, where other players don't need the game to play. I'm not sure if this is just one shared screen (fine) or if potentially the game can stream different things to different players (effing radical). But adoption seems quite low.
Maybe. Remember, there was no other option to play mobile games for quite a while, so nintendo had the "exclusive".
. Steam library is really big and can increase in size way faster than Nintendo by simply improving proton.
Still, I see your point.
To be fair, I don't understand how people accept the Switch controllers breaking so easily. It's really really bad. A terrible product, they always drift
It’s not strictly better. It has many advantages, but it’s heavier, larger, hotter, louder and more expensive, without the ability to detach controllers. Not to mention it lacks the ability to easily play Nintendo titles.
It’s better in many ways which many people care about, but it’s not strictly better.
Created a Steam account a few weeks ago to buy one. Was promptly told I needed to do a bunch of stuff to verify I wasn't committing fraud (or something like that), including resending them a bunch of info they already had, plus a picture of my ID. Support personnel seemed to be hired based on their skills at being unhelpful smartasses. Promptly closed the account without awarding them a single thing they were demanding, ain't nobody got time for that shit.
I bought a used (but good condition) Switch Lite a few weeks ago for £105, and the new-in-box retail price is £188.
The cheapest Steam Deck costs £349, which is almost double the Lite's RRP. Price matters a lot, especially when these things are often bought for kids.
Anecdotally, my peak Linux gaming was during the pandemic. I played Warframe and Overwatch in Proton at least a few times a week. Now I mostly play Call of Duty DMZ, which does not run on Proton thanks to anti-cheat, so I play in Windows.
I don't have a Steam Deck though. I don't know how much that drove the player numbers. I'll bet Linux gaming gets a bump when CS2 comes out.
Linux gaming for CS2 will be relevant only when major desktop environments (Gnome and KDE) fully implement Wayland screen tearing control and adaptive sync. Overall input lag on Linux is too high for competitive shooters.
I'm curious about this. How do you reasonably measure input latency on Linux? Do you need hardware support? I am still on X11 with awesome-wm and no compositor, so I don't know much about how well Wayland handles things.
I haven't run Arch Linux, but what I've heard is that you have to know what you're doing in order to run it. So I'm surprised it's the most popular Linux OS after SteamOS. Is it actually less difficult than I heard?
It was much rougher in the early days, as there were massive fundamental changes - adopting systemd, /lib becoming symlinks, etc.
But now I wouldn't use anything else. I have my configurations synced with a Gitlab repo via chezmoi, and have a bootable customised USB stick built with ALMA - so I can easily set up the same system on different machines. In that time I've used different set-ups - dwm on an 11" netbook (could only have one app per workspace and they had to be full-screen), xmonad and awesome-wm for a bit, and now i3.
One issue to note on the Steam Deck though is that it's immutable by default. So atm to install the xone drivers for example, you have to enable system mutability and reinstall them after every system update.
But it's so nice having something that is up-to-date - e.g. for kernel hardware support, bug fixes, etc. but also won't change much unless you want it to. I even use it on my work computer now since my company allows it, and it's so much better than losing hours to intrusive updates on Mac (or Windows).
As a Linux noob I decided to try Arch Linux 4 years ago because I wanted to actually learn how the various parts work that make out a whole Linux distro (things like the bootloader, systemd, various desktop environments etc). Other distros give you everything ready out of the box, which made it hard for me to actually dig deeper under the hood, because I had no clue where to start. With Arch Linux you more or less build a whole Linux system from the bottom up.
Following the Arch guides to get a fully working system was easy enough for a complete Linux noob like me. But you still need some basic knowledge about computing, for things like networking, file systems, drive partitioning and such. If you learned this knowledge from other operating systems then Arch Linux is fairly easy to setup by just following their guide.
I have been using Arch for more than 10 years and it is great.
It has great Wiki to start using it, and it is very stable considering it is a rolling release distro.
Back in the day Ubuntu upgrades were extremely painful for me because I had to use a few custom repositories to get up to date versions of common software and they broke upgrades. On Arch it is not really an issue because everything is up to date. And even if something breaks once in a few years, if you set it up yourself (not using Manjaro) you will most likely have a better understanding of Linux and you will be able to fix those issues. And if you check Arch news before updating, you will never run into those problems in the first place. :)
Also you don’t technically have to know what you are doing. Their guide is very helpful at guiding you, but it’s all commands you have to type out on the command line until you get to a more GUI environment.
I absolutely do not know what I am doing, and managed to get an Arch Linux setup working on a laptop.
It's complicated, but the Arch Linux docs are fantastic.
Didn't try gaming on it, though - I have a Steam Deck for that ;) Though I can plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor and switch to desktop mode on the deck if I need to work, so maybe I'll just use that as my laptop now
There is once again a TUI installer, but also a lot of the standardisation of hardware platforms (UEFI), GPU landscape (Intel and AMD graphics "just work"), printers (IPP/AirPrint), the desktop Linux foundational layers (systemd), have combined to make Arch much easier than when it earned that reputation a decade ago.
I think the questionable but was referring to the fact Chinese users doubled this month which seems unlikely as they went from about a quarter of all steam users to about a half.
That would be a lot of new people if at all accurate.
I have a Steam Deck and personally haven't played it much last month. The big releases were AAA games that generally ran poorly on the Deck. I imagine most gamers were like me and decided to play Hogwarts Legacy on their main PC or PS5.
I think it’s because there have been a few hit games lately that don’t work with Proton; while China requires every game to now have CCP approval causing few (and late) launches.
So, if the rest of the world is off playing new games and China isn’t…
That’s not what I said. I said the author is inconsistent with his framing: It’s a great thing if there’s an increase, “questionable” if there is a decline.
Perhaps that's the reality hitting the Linux folks such as Phoronix when as long as 'number go up' is it 'believable' but when it goes down it is 'questionable'. It can't be both at the same time from the same source.
This specific issue, "the dramatic change of Chinese user" also has happened multiple times in recent years.
I just had a glance at this newest report, https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
In the very first item, it shows "Windows 11 64 bit 22.41% (change: -9.65%)"
This obviously doesn't make any sense. It either suffers from small sample size, or a skewed one.
My guess is Valve probably failed to deliver the surveys to players in an uniform, representative fashion.
Either way, don't take it seriously.