This may not seem like an important update, but it provides a much better picture

Feb 27, 2014 13:06 GMT  ·  By

The Steam Hardware Survey published by Valve at the beginning of every month has just received a small update that will allow users to better distinguish the platform usage. Up until now, the Steam Hardware Survey showed all of the platforms, displayed in the order of usage. As you can expect, the Windows platforms were always on top, followed by Mac OS X and, finally, by Linux.

The Steam for Linux client has been out for a little over a year, and the number of users has been increasing at a steady pace from one month to the next. Until now it was a lot harder to see the differences clearly, but Valve took care of this issue with a simple update to the website.

The platforms are now displayed separately, and the Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux percentages are shown in their own category. Another very important aspect is that the “Others” category has disappeared, but the numbers are adding up to 100%.

The Steam Hardware Survey is taking randomly by Valve during the course of an entire month. If you have Steam installed, you might be prompted from time to time with a message from Valve asking for access to your system and hardware requirements. If you agree, the details about your systems are sent back to Valve and compiled into a comprehensive survey.

Even if you are prompted with the message while you are in a Windows operating system, but you are usually running a Linux OS, don't feel bad. The number of respondents is large enough that the total sum will round up correctly.

It's unsure what was hiding in the “Others” category, but we can only surmise that there were a lot of Linux distributions. If we compare the last Steam Hardware Survey, which hovered around the 1.10% mark, the new system shows Linux at 1.34, a 0.24% increase.

The large number of players and the number of respondents to the Steam Hardware Survey also provides another insight that is rather accurate. Statistics tell us that, the greater the number of respondents to a poll, the smaller the error margin.

This means that it is very likely that the number of Linux desktop users is also hovering at the 1.5% mark, which is around the number proposed by various marketing research firms (this is about desktop market share and not server market share).

The next Steam Hardware Survey, for the month of February, will be released in a couple of days and we will be able to better gauge the impact of the new format and the removal of the “Others” category.