We recently conducted a survey to determine what desktop OS (operating system) the visitors of our site use. Windows is expected to take the top spot so, we included dual-booting in the survey. The results confirmed our theory that some Windows users are also Linux users. If you bought a game that supports both Linux and Windows, will it be counted as a Linux game sale or a Windows game sale?
Here is how Steam determines if a purchase is counted as a Linux game sale or a Windows game sale [1][2][3][4].
- The OS of the PC used to purchase the game will be determined as the OS where the “purchase” was made.
- After 7 days from the date of purchase, the OS with the most amount of time played will be determined as the OS where the purchase was made.
For example, you bought F1 2017 using a PC running on Windows. It would be initially counted as a Windows game sale based from the information above. You immediately played it on Windows and had a total of 12 hours playing time for the first 3 days. Then for the next 5 days, you played it for 20 hours on Linux. Your purchase would then be finally counted as a Linux game sale.
So, does it matter? Yes if you are primarily a Linux gamer and you just dual boot with Windows because you like doing game performance comparisons.
Game developers use sales data in making decisions such as whether they should continue developing games for Linux. If you support Linux gaming, ensure that your purchase counts as a Linux game sale.
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By the way, there is another method to make sure that your purchase counts as a Linux game sale but is only applicable to certain games on Steam. Games ported to Linux by Feral Interactive can be bought at The Feral Store and all purchases made from there are sure to be counted as a Linux game sale. You’ll receive a Steam game code which you will activate at the Steam app. To those who don’t know, Feral Interactive is currently the game developer that has the biggest support for Linux gaming. They ported to Linux some of the best PC games of today such as F1 2017, DiRT Rally, HITMAN, and XCOM2. This Spring 2018, Rise of the Tomb Raider will come to Linux and it will use Vulkan.
