New steam survey statistics?

[Scott Ritchie]

When we last heard from Valve a year ago, Wine had about a .4% share of
the steam user base.  It would be interesting to see how this has
changed since then - in that time, we've both released Wine 1.0 and
likely seen Linux adoption increase a great deal.  Linux had doubled its
desktop marketshare the year preceding the last survey, I wouldn't be
surprised to see Wine usage at around 1% on steam now.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

[Evil Jay]

I too would be interested in seeing the numbers, but I'm not sure you're
going to see the correlation you expect, Scott.

While Linux adoption may have grown, Valve has probably been selling
just as many, if not more games to customers who already owned Windows
but had never used Steam.

I suppose it could say something about the number of Linux users that
have a proclivity for gaming - which might be great to tell company X: 
"Hey, port your game to Linux - we know for sure that there are at least
Y number of gamers out there and you'll have very little competition for
their business if you hurry!".

-J

Scott Ritchie wrote:
> When we last heard from Valve a year ago, Wine had about a .4% share of
> the steam user base.  It would be interesting to see how this has
> changed since then - in that time, we've both released Wine 1.0 and
> likely seen Linux adoption increase a great deal.  Linux had doubled its
> desktop marketshare the year preceding the last survey, I wouldn't be
> surprised to see Wine usage at around 1% on steam now.
>
> Thanks,
> Scott Ritchie

[Scott Ritchie]

Evil Jay wrote:
> I too would be interested in seeing the numbers, but I'm not sure you're
> going to see the correlation you expect, Scott.
>
> While Linux adoption may have grown, Valve has probably been selling
> just as many, if not more games to customers who already owned Windows
> but had never used Steam.

A priori, I don't think there's any reason to expect a decrease in
Wine's steam marketshare unless there's something that's made it
relatively worse compared with a Windows install.  The release of
BioShock over steam, for instance, was such a reason since it didn't
work on Wine, but that happened before the previous survey.  New video
cards not having (good) Linux drivers would be a similar reason, but as
I understand it the newer video cards have better Linux drivers these
days than the old ones.

On the other hand, we've seen some serious relative improvements to Wine
- Wine 1.0, Crossover Games, new distro releases, increased Linux
desktop marketshare.  Maybe 1% is too high, but I'm certainly not
expecting a decrease.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

[Alfred Reynolds]

We recently switched our survey system from a monolithic bi-yearly
survey to a monthly rolling survey with a subset of the userbase each
month, so we can get a continuous view of changes in hardware amongst
our users.

We have 2 months of good data to date, Wine usage has increased from
0.33 to 0.36% over that month, but given the small number of Wine
responses any increase would be in the margins of error. So Wine usage
looks steady since last year amongst the Steam usebase as a whole.

As always the Steam Survey is an opt-in system so usual reporting biases
could apply.

- Alfred
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail] [mailto:wine-devel-
> [e-mail]] On Behalf Of Scott Ritchie
> Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 9:21 AM
> To: Evil Jay
> Cc: Wine Devel
> Subject: Re: New steam survey statistics?
>
> Evil Jay wrote:
> > I too would be interested in seeing the numbers, but I'm not sure
>
> you're
> > going to see the correlation you expect, Scott.
> >
> > While Linux adoption may have grown, Valve has probably been selling
> > just as many, if not more games to customers who already owned
>
> Windows
> > but had never used Steam.
>
> A priori, I don't think there's any reason to expect a decrease in
> Wine's steam marketshare unless there's something that's made it
> relatively worse compared with a Windows install.  The release of
> BioShock over steam, for instance, was such a reason since it didn't
> work on Wine, but that happened before the previous survey.  New video
> cards not having (good) Linux drivers would be a similar reason, but

as
> I understand it the newer video cards have better Linux drivers these
> days than the old ones.
>
> On the other hand, we've seen some serious relative improvements to
> Wine
> - Wine 1.0, Crossover Games, new distro releases, increased Linux
>
> desktop marketshare.  Maybe 1% is too high, but I'm certainly not
> expecting a decrease.
>
> Thanks,
> Scott Ritchie

[Scott Ritchie]

Yeah, it would not surprise me if Wine users are much less likely to
follow the survey for whatever reason.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

Alfred Reynolds wrote:
> We recently switched our survey system from a monolithic bi-yearly
> survey to a monthly rolling survey with a subset of the userbase each
> month, so we can get a continuous view of changes in hardware amongst
> our users.
>
> We have 2 months of good data to date, Wine usage has increased from
> 0.33 to 0.36% over that month, but given the small number of Wine
> responses any increase would be in the margins of error. So Wine usage
> looks steady since last year amongst the Steam usebase as a whole.
>
> As always the Steam Survey is an opt-in system so usual reporting biases
> could apply.
> - Alfred
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: [e-mail] [mailto:wine-devel-
> > [e-mail]] On Behalf Of Scott Ritchie
> > Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 9:21 AM
> > To: Evil Jay
> > Cc: Wine Devel
> > Subject: Re: New steam survey statistics?
> >
> > Evil Jay wrote:
> > > I too would be interested in seeing the numbers, but I'm not sure
> >
> > you're
> > > going to see the correlation you expect, Scott.
> > >
> > > While Linux adoption may have grown, Valve has probably been selling
> > > just as many, if not more games to customers who already owned
> >
> > Windows
> > > but had never used Steam.
> >
> > A priori, I don't think there's any reason to expect a decrease in
> > Wine's steam marketshare unless there's something that's made it
> > relatively worse compared with a Windows install.  The release of
> > BioShock over steam, for instance, was such a reason since it didn't
> > work on Wine, but that happened before the previous survey.  New video
> > cards not having (good) Linux drivers would be a similar reason, but
>
> as
> > I understand it the newer video cards have better Linux drivers these
> > days than the old ones.
> >
> > On the other hand, we've seen some serious relative improvements to
> > Wine
> > - Wine 1.0, Crossover Games, new distro releases, increased Linux
> >
> > desktop marketshare.  Maybe 1% is too high, but I'm certainly not
> > expecting a decrease.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Scott Ritchie

[Sparr]

I considered not submitting the survey because it misdetected my CPU
as 1GHz (it's an Athlon 64 3400ishiforgotexactly).

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 4:12 PM, Scott Ritchie  wrote:
> Yeah, it would not surprise me if Wine users are much less likely to
> follow the survey for whatever reason.