Comment on Steam Replay is live and notes only 14% "of playtime spent by all Steam users" was for 2025 releases
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoThe stats they show are pretty basic usage stats many are in the UI already. No one is showing the actual valuable data they are harvesting.
They aren’t really hiding the OS stats, it’s regularly published in the hardware and software survey. Showing my steam deck time is over the average of 0% isn’t really surprising news.
MudMan@fedia.io 1 day ago
Nnnnah, the hardware survey is a wildly different number. That's what OS each account was using when they filled the survey.
This shows they have data on what OS each user is using at the time of running each game, on both a per-game and a per-hour basis and that they can tie all of it to each account across games and OSs. Which raises the question of why they run the hardware survey OS numbers in the first place, but I suppose if you're sharing the survey results you share the survey results, even if you have more accurate data on the same stats elsewhere.
That'd be a very interesting, very different stat, though, because it means they know what percentage of Windows/Linux users go back and forth, and CAN separate Linux usage from Deck from other OSs, which they very pointedly do not do on the survey, where SteamOS doesn't have its own entry. That's unsurprising but notable, along with the fact that they don't really report on their own hardware sales, either, despite being a main source of info about GPU and CPU vendors.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Steam OS is listed in the survey, it’s 26% of Linux os use.
Tracking game use by device id isn’t that crazy, the steam app should know what OS it’s installed on.
MudMan@fedia.io 1 day ago
Is it listed? Do you have a link to that? Checking the latest survey the Linux section shows
"Arch Linux" 64 bit
0.32%
+0.01%
Linux Mint 22.2 64 bit
0.24%
+0.04%
Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit
0.14%
0.00%
Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS 64 bit
0.12%
+0.01%
I don't see a SteamOS segment listed as a non-Linux OS anywhere, either. If they do provide the info I'd love to see it, but it doesn't seem to be shown at a glance in the OS Version category.
Tracking game use by device isn't any more or less "crazy" than anything else they store. It's just telemetry. It's noteworthy that they share it in the format that they share it.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
It’s only listed if you filter to Linux. It’s called steamOS Holo 64 bit.