Steam on Linux Metrics ends 2022 in some single digits

Valve just published Steam Survey results for December 2022 which came as a bit of a surprise.

As published in early December and numbers held today, set the metrics for November 2022 Steam on Linux with 1.44% market share An increase of 0.16% over the month of October. November results indicated gains in the Linux market as a result of increased Steam Deck usage based on SteamOS Holo and AMD Custom GPU 0405 data points.

Steam Linux ratios for November 2022.

Steam Linux Percentages for December 2022 with “Strange” percentage increasing month over month.

But what makes things weird is the December 2022 report that put Linux’s market share up 0.10%, but the percentage of market share at 1.38%…or 0.06% lower than the November numbers. So it’s another case of recalculating numbers or other oddities from Steam survey results.

Original data for November has macOS at 2.45% and Windows at 96.11% while newly published data for December has Windows at 96.15% with a reported decrease of 0.35% and macOS at 0.25% to 2.48%. Again, misalignment at all from Valve’s previous month’s data.

What makes the December numbers even stranger is that when you pull in just the Linux survey data, they show a 0.91% decrease for SteamOS Holo (despite a 0.77% increase for Flatpak Steam), AMD CPU share fell 0.84%, and the percentage fell for AMD Custom GPU 0405 by 0.90%. Or to put it another way, Steam Deck’s share of Linux gamers shrank by just under 1% for the month of December. This is unusual given the Steam Deck’s success and Valve continues to ship more units each week and is currently a major driver of Linux game adoption.

So either the random element in the Steam Survey pick was a little crazy for the month of December or there are other weird things going on with the Steam Survey that seem to happen more often. We’ll see if the numbers are revised in the coming days while you can now find the current data at SteamPowered.com.