As we enter a new month, Steam’s Hardware and Software Survey data has been processed, providing us with a clearer view of the overall gaming market that uses Steam platform. Today, the most notable change in the Steam Survey is the increase in Linux gamers, who have moved from their historically low single-digit market share to mid-single digits. As of March, Linux-based operating systems were running Steam on 5.33% of all polled systems. This represents an impressive 3.10% increase over February’s data, which showed a dip in Linux market share from January’s 3.5%. Fortunately, the numbers have now been revised upwards, marking a significant improvement for the community that has been steadily implementing improvements and making Linux-based gaming more accessible to everyone.
What might not be surprising is that a large portion of those 5.33% Linux installations run on Valve’s customized SteamOS operating system. With a 24.48% share, the use of SteamOS grew by 0.65% last month alone, while other Linux distributions also contributed significantly. Other Windows alternatives like macOS are gaining momentum as well, with Apple seeing a 1.19% month-over-month increase to 2.35%. Although Linux now holds more than twice the market share of macOS, its growth within the Steam install base is a significant change, nearly doubling in just a month. Perhaps these alternative operating systems are now attracting enough attention from big game studios to encourage them to release native ports instead of relying on translation tools like Wine/Proton.
Interestingly, the Windows family of operating systems still holds a large majority at 92.33%. However, this is a 4.28% reduction from February, indicating that many users have become frustrated enough with Microsoft’s updates and functional issues to consider alternatives. An interesting case is Windows 7, which now holds 0.08% of Windows OS installations but saw a 0.03% increase in market share among Windows OSes. Windows 11 experienced a massive increase of 10.57%, pushing its share to 66.85%. This growth has come at the expense of Windows 10, which lost 14.89% and now holds 25.36%. Since the change is not simply a uniform upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11, it suggests that a significant number of gamers have switched to Linux and, surprisingly, macOS for their basic gaming needs.