UPDATED 14:30 EDT / MARCH 05 2013

NEWS

Valve’s Steam Client for Linux Brings More Gamers to the Yard

Valve recently conducted a survey on the latest software/hardware stats about its customers. And the interesting figures are about the Linux gamers. The number of Linux gamers has increased to around 2 percent of Valve’s Steam users. This is roughly double of the stats taken last month, which sounds pretty good.

Out of this 2 percent, Ubuntu 12.10 x86_64 is the most popular Linux distribution followed by other flavors of Ubuntu, and Linux Mint now comes in at just over 0.1%. Followed by Linux, here comes the Apple OS X with a usage of 3 percent. So, the majority share remains with the Microsoft Windows, which is not expected to be taken away anytime soon.

Steam conducts a monthly survey to collect data about what kinds of computer hardware and software our customers are using. The survey comes up with some interesting, and also a handful of strange results… like Firefox really six times more popular than Chrome on Windows, people still gaming on 640×480 monitors, etc. Accordingly, Windows 7 is the most popular OS among gamers, with 55.48 of the total share. Around 73% gamers have microphones on their systems, and 53.21 percent playing in English language systems.

Apparently 12.09% also have EA games, and 5.28% run BitTorrent. Take a look at the thorough survey results here.

Valve announced the availability of Steam on Linux mid of last month. To celebrate the release, Valve also offered over 50 Linux titles at 50-75% off until Thursday, February 21st. Some of the titles included Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life and Team Fortress 2, with a promo of its own.

While this was already good news for Linux gamers, here’s something in the same vein. A gamer, codenamed as GhostSquad57, rewrote the Valve Steam installer for Debian, and uploaded his efforts to Github yesterday. Ever since, it has reached out to the Linux community on Reddit for testers, and received a mixed bag of feedback–praises and critics both.

“Valve is entering into a new and unexplored market for them,” says SiliconANGLE assistant editor Kyt Dotson. “As we’ve seen with GhostSquad57, Linux is interrelated to a hacker culture who are happy to contribute even to commercial interests when they approach their community. By including themselves in the OSS community, Valve may find a lot of traction with not just Linux users, but the members of the OSS audience who labor to make every product in their ecology better.”


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