Do these numbers actually tell us anything?
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| Author | Content |
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| BernardSwiss May 02, 2013 7:01 PM EDT |
Several interesting points noted here (following/quoting links in the OP comments):Cheeseness wrote: April's Linux results also have less than half the decline of the Mac OS results (cumulatively down by 0.23%), showing Linux to be holding comparatively strong against the corresponding Windows growth, most of which seems to be Windows 8 and Windows Vista uptake."http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamlug/announcements/deta... danharibo wrote: We don't know what the sampling method is, but going by the fact that Vista increased by 0.62 percentage points (and the fact I hope Vista isn't increasing market share) I'd say there is a fair bit of noise in the data that makes working with such small percentages rather difficult.http://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamlug/announcements/deta... Also, for what it's worth (keeping in mind the human propensity for selection bias) there appears to be some question whether Valve's Steam client survey is actually sampling randomly and/or representatively, as it should. http://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/2286 |
| jacog May 03, 2013 8:06 AM EDT |
Two sites reported on the same stats... one saw the 0.23% drop as terrible, while the other reported it was meaning that Linux is holding steady. Regardless, if Linux is 1.6% of the total Steam userbase, that equates to about 700000-ish users. Not a big sum in a world where AAA titles need to sell in excess of 5 million copies of a game before it can be labelled a success, but for indie devs that means a potential market of 700000 users that have only about 200 games to choose from. That's a very comfortable niche there. |
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