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Comment by tredre3 | Hacker News Reader

> 27% of that 3% is the Steam Deck / Lenovo Legion Go S. So most Linux players are in fact not on the Steam Deck.

If that is true then one of those other two claims has to be false:

1. Using the latest months recorded share (Oct-2025 - 3.05%): 4,026,000 estimated "monthly active users" for Linux+Steam.

2. Market research firm International Data Corporation estimated that between 3.7 and 4 million Steam Decks had been sold by the third anniversary of the device in February 2025.

27% of 4M gives us 1M Steam Deck + Legion users. Yet 4M were sold. That begs the question: How could it be? Do 75% of Steam Deck users run Windows? Have 75% of Steam Decks ended up in the landfill? Are the sale figures estimates wildly off-base?

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Why would it be strange that there are steam decks that sit unused ? I have a switch and a PS 5 that go untouched for months (even with a 4 year old who I occasionally let play some games). I think most people in my friend group are similar in that they have some gaming gear but rarely the time to use it. Still nice to have once you do.

These stats are probably skewed by how much people play. Competitive FPSers and MMOers play a lot, and the genres are the least friendly to Linux for various reasons.

Alternative options:

- International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks.

- Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't report themselves to be Steam Decks

- Most likely: most Steam Deck users opt out of participating in the Steam Hardware survey/analytics.

Last year, I didn't participate in the Steam Hardware survey on my Deck, only on my PC. This year, I participated on my Deck and my desktop, but not my laptop. I still have three devices running Steam. To any survey, it'll look like the amount of Steam devices doubled even though I'm only reporting 67% of my devices to analytics.

Even more likely: A sizable portion of Steam Decks sold are not played every month.

The third is close but it's even more likely that they just weren't prompted to survey at all rather than opting out. They're surveys, not automatic data harvesting, they don't represent things like Facebook's "total monthly active users". They're just a random sample of users, not a population count. Steam does sometimes report things like monthly active users in their annual reports, but haven't ever broken that down I don't think, but you can just infer it from the surveys.

I also have steam on multiple devices including a steam deck. On desktop I'm pretty much always logged in and I play games frequently, but most months I'm not selected for a survey. I use my steam deck less frequently and have maybe only gotten the survey prompt on it once or twice.

You REALLY don't need to care about querying the whole population for these kinds of statistics. Steam has a MAU of at least 132,000,000 users. To randomly sample from just 17,000 users (0.0012% of the MAU) would provide a 99% confidence the sample is within +-0.5% the actual value. Given that you've personally been selected multiple months, they are almost certainly well and above a sampling rate worth worrying about.

The survey does have other statistical noises/biases/errors though - but none nearly as large as this "gap". E.g. internet cafe reuse of the same machines by different accounts means if you're hoping for a "hardware popularity survey" instead of a "hardware users use popularity survey" then the number won't always make sense.

Another alternative

- may depend on the period being measured.

I haven't looked at the article or their methodology, but if they were measuring over a certain period of time, a few hours, or even 24 hours, it will still likely only pick up a proportion of Steam owners.

I’m Linux gaming bazzite on my tower. Sees at least as many of us as steam decks.

#1 Is MAU. I wouldn't find it out of the realm of possibility that only 25% of owners played in the prior month. I wonder what this is for other consoles. I personally contribute to bursts of playing then months of not even touching some of my consoles.

I have a Steam Deck. Haven't booted it up in months. It convinced me that I could game on Linux, now I game on my Desktop.

Similar thing happened to me. I borrowed steamdeck, realized that i don't like handhelds but i liked gaming on Linux. So i bought a laptop that replaced my macbook for work but it games better than steamdeck.

I use my Steam Deck as a game console, connected to my beamer and with 4x PS5 controllers. Works great for that with the Steam game mode. But yes it's been a long time since I played anything on the big screen.

Isn't the more obvious answer that the market research firm got their number wrong?

Or, you know, most steam deck users aren't using them constantly and so they don't get picked up in the survey.

They likely stopped using them altogether.

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