Valve has just released the Steam Survey results for December 2022, which come as a bit of a surprise.
Released at the beginning of December and the numbers still standing, the figures for November 2022 give Steam on Linux a 1.44% market share, up 0.16% from October. November’s results indicated a gain in Linux market share as a result of increased Steam Deck usage, based on SteamOS Holo and AMD Custom GPU 0405 data points.
Steam Linux percentages for November 2022.
Steam Linux percentages for December 2022 with “strange” month-over-month percentage growth.
But the December 2022 report oddly puts Linux’s market share at 0.10%, but the percentage market share at 1.38%… Or 0.06% lower than November’s numbers. So it’s another case of Steam Survey results being recalculated or some other oddity.
Initial data for November put macOS at 2.45% and Windows at 96.11%, while the newly released December data shows Windows at 96.15%, down 0.35%, and macOS : an increase of 0.25% to 2.48%. Again, not at all consistent with Valve’s data from last month.
Making December’s numbers even weirder is that when the Linux survey data alone shows a 0.91% decline for SteamOS Holo (despite a 0.77% increase over Flatpak Steam), AMD’s CPU market share is declining 0.84% and AMD Custom GPU 0405 percentage decreased by 0.90%. Or to put it another way, the Steam Deck’s market share for Linux gamers fell by just 1% for the month of December. That’s pretty unusual given the success of Steam Deck and Valve continuing to ship many more units every week, and it’s now a major driver of Linux gaming adoption.
So either the random Steam Survey selection element for December was pretty dodgy, or there are other weird things going on with the Steam Survey that seem to happen every so often. We’ll see if the numbers are revised in the coming days, for now you can find the current data at SteamPowered.com.
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