https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
All of the results are very odd. If you look through the other categories, Simplified Chinese gained THIRTY percent, the Hard Drive categories also wildly changed, and 32 GB RAM jumped +18%. It seems to me like a bunch of Chinese systems just flooded the statistics.
The stats are a sample, there is inheritantly some level of error. Ignore the month to month changes, focus on the longer term trends.
GamingOnLinux updated their Steam Tracker with February’s data: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/
Linux, English Only went from January’s 7.59% to 8.27%. There’s a huge influx of Chinese users in this month’s data.
Looking at the huge spike in Simplified Chinese number, it seems like yet another oversampling of Chinese computers. A more reliable metric is Linux share for computers with English as their language, currently at >8% for the first time.
Is it oversampling or just the fact there are a lot of users from China?
could have something to do with the odd, and massive, influx of new win10 users?
It’s due to how Valve conducts these surveys. Rather than pulling from the entire user pool at once, they rotate between different chunks of the userbase every month.
You’ll notice this if you look at the system language stats, The Chinese speaking population jumps and falls by a rather large percent every month.
This also could explain why Windows 10 had another jump in users this month, From what I hear internet cafes are still a popular way to game in China. and I doubt many of these places have updated all their machines to Windows 11 yet.
I’m no survey expert, but why doesn’t Valve get a mixed distribution from all countries?
Data has value and this data is particularly valuable to Valve and its competitors. So Valve share the raw data which has gross numbers but they don’t share the useful data. The useful data is the processed data - the corrected and weighted data based on the other information Valve has about its users and install base. That way can weight this months survey responses to expected proportions of the whole user base and see actual user wide figures and trends.
What Valve shares is akin to a polling company sharing the raw data from the people who completed a polling survey. It’s relatively meaningless and even misleading until they correct the data to weight it to make it representative of the whole population.
So this month there were 1.15% fewer linux users in the survey pool, not 1.15% fewer linux users overall. They will correct the data to see an actual proportion of Linux users. For example: they have data on every use of Proton and every install of Linux versions of software; and how many times each user installs a game (occasional vs heavy users). They don’t share that but they can use that to help correct the data and get much more accurate picture - one they don’t share as it gives them a commercial advantage.
