The figures posted by Steam on New Year’s Day for participation in the December 2020 Linux games market showed a drop of 0.33% to just 0.57%. This is a pretty big drop, but now Valve has updated its numbers and points to Linux still regressing in percentage, but not as bad as originally reported.
After standing at 0.9% in the month of November, Valve’s revised December 2020 numbers put its share of the Linux game market at 0.74%, or a fall of 0.16%, but at least not so significant that it was pushing the size of Linux games to just half a percent.
As for the fall of December, there are a number of opinions on Cyberpunk 2077 increasing the numbers of Windows (Cyberpunk can run on Linux via Steam Play, but with several bugs), an increase in Chinese users and winter game sales benefiting more Linux market share. There is also the issue of the increase in Steam users in general due to Cyberpunk 2077 and also around the Christmas and New Year holidays, with many taking time off from work.
In any case, the results of the Steam Survey now point to the percentage of Linux at 0.74%, while macOS is at 2.74% and Windows at 96.51%.