Valve Reveals First Month of Steam Linux Gains

An anonymous reader writes with news that Valve has updated its Hardware & Software Survey for December 2012, which reflects the first month of the platform being available for Linux. Even though the project is still in a beta test, players on Ubuntu already account for 0.8% of Steam usage. The 64-bit clients for Ubuntu 12.10 and 12.04.1 showed about double the share of the 32-bit versions. MacOS use also showed growth, rising to about 3.7%. Windows 7's usage share dropped by over 2%, but balanced by the growth of Windows 8, which is now at just under 7%. The total share for Windows is still about 95%.

Comments

Re:DRM

[kthreadd]

Steam IS DRM.

Steam is a distribution system that uses DRM. They could choose to stop using it and still be a distribution system.

Re:It Could Be More

[darkHanzz]

Perhaps their engineers are not that skilled?

They started with getting it to work on one distribution (on of the more popular ones), they will get it to work on others.

The articles describing how the worked with graphics card manufacturers to improve performance on linux suggests that their engineers are quite skilled, but only human, so they cannot do everything at once.

Re:DRM

[Rockoon]

I don't know if I can really pinpoint why I don't consider Steam to be the kick to the dick that almost all other DRM is.

Two reasons.

1) It continues to just work.
2) You get at least the game-play value out of it that you spent.

I've picked up a lot of sub-$5 games on steam. You know how much I will care if at some point I can no longer play them? About as much as a care that I let $5 worth of cheese spoil in my refrigerator this week. I wish it didn't happen, but it doesnt pain me.

Re:Doesn't help that Steam client is poorly writte

[Anonymous Coward]

You've gone to far. RealPlayer is literally the worst program in the entire world.

ComplainersThe world is passing you by...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can spend all your time fighting extraordinarily un-restraining DRM, or you can play games.
Stop looking a gift horse in the mouth. From the numbers, having Steam support linux games at all is pretty silly from the business perspective.
It's an act of good will that it exists at all.

So, keep complaining, if you think that's getting you anywhere. I'm going back to playing games

Re:DRM

[AlphaWolf_HK]

The thing with steam DRM though is that you don't really even notice it is there. Contrast to that of CD's of yore where if you forgot to put the right disc in the drive, your game won't start even though it doesn't actually need it. Or when you had those challenge response code books. Or worse, the ones where you had to read the damn manual with a red filter.

Also offline mode is an option with steam too, unlike say diablo 3.

One thing about older DRM was that the pirated version offered better value than the legit version because you didn't have to bother with that crap. Steam on the other hand the legit version offers many benefits that you don't get with a pirated version, like cloud save data and no need to hunt down the game discs if you re-format your PC.