Valve has published their latest monthly Steam survey data, which shows an increase in the Linux gaming population.
For November 2018, Steam's Survey reports a 0.80% marketshare for Linux, which is a 0.08% increase over October, which was on an upward trend following the roll-out of Steam Play late this summer for allowing Windows-only games to run more easily on Linux with their Wine-based Proton software... Earlier this year it was around just 0.5% Linux marketshare and last year there were the lows of around 0.3%.
While 0.80% may not seem like much, it's significant when factoring in the size of Steam's customer base that is reportedly at 125+ million users.Not only is Linux up, MacOS is also up, and Windows is down, in a rare case of Steam users actually trending in the same direction as the market overall.
There's a lot of overlap between Steam's user base and the PC gaming community overlap, and their higher Windows 10 adoption rate, and higher PC purchasing rate, were helping to drive Windows 10's numbers upwards. Windows 10 is still pushing out Windows 7 among PC gamers, but with more PC gamers shifting from Windows to Mac OS X and Linux because of Steam Play, this shift among the most active PC purchasers could be a significant driver of the overall market shift away from Linux.
Importantly, MacOS X and Steam are both consumer-driven market segments, which could mean that Microsoft is losing consumers to both Apple and FOSS. Back in July, Microsoft had talked about their desire to win back consumers with Modern Life Services. We've heard nothing about that consumer-focused initiative since, and if this trend in Windows' market share is any indication, Microsoft's time could be starting to run out. Windows has a healthy lead in PC gaming, though, with a 96.00% market share, so there's still time for Microsoft to react... if they start now.
Tick, tock, Microsoft. Your move.