Ubuntu snares 1.12% of Steam’s market share – within two-months of debut

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In its January 2013 Steam software and hardware survey, the gaming leader had some new stats to show in terms of market share the various OS had gained.

Though, only two months since Ubuntu has been available on Steam, the open source Operating System has already made deep in roads into the market space.

OS market Stats for Steam 

Up until now, the major OS that Steam has traditionally supported is Microsoft’s Windows; over the period, windows 7 has the lion’s share of the market with 69.73%, followed by Windows XP at 10.05%, Windows 8 has 8.67%, while windows Vista has 6.02% of the market share.

Mac is the only other OS until two months ago and enjoyed 3.56% of the market place. However, in the past two months, things have changed rapidly in terms of market shares and Ubuntu OS has captured 1.12% of the Steam market space.

The market share numbers are indeed disappointing for Windows OS. Only Windows 8 stood its ground, while Windows 7, Vista and XP show a loss of users.

Number of games available for non-Windows OS poor

While Mac has over 536 games already available on Steam, Linux at last count had 73 games only.

Tables turn in Ubuntu’s favor with Linux Client for Steam by Valve
Valve was synonymous with Windows users up until a year ago. Most Linux users had to have dual-booting with Windows to access Steam vault of games as the number of games for native Linux were limited.

Even as recent as 2010, Valve did not respond to the huge Linux community gamers needs. However, the sudden release of Steam’s Linux client by Valve followed by a campaign asking users to move to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, saw the Linux user base surge.

A look at Steam’s About Page says it all for Linux.

Even though the number of games yet to move from Windows domain to Linux is innumerable, these first steps set the tone of what to expect in the near future.

Steam is the gaming store that offers unlimited titles for play for various OS.

Way forward for Ubuntu on Steam

Expectations are very high that despite Windows 7 likely to dominate its position throughout 2013, Windows 8 likely growth, Ubuntu too will continue to surge and look at perhaps over-running Mac OS market share.

A single month public beta run has opened the steam valves, it is only a matter of time before, Ubuntu snares a competitive share of the Steam market place.

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