I’m not saying that Chinese players only play Dota 2 and PUBG. I’m saying that measurably, the biggest swings in the survey come from Chinese players who only play a couple of the biggest games and nothing else, and they play on homogenized hardware at gaming centers running the same graphics card and operating system. In these same ebbs and flows, people write articles saying “Linux usage surges” and “Windows 11 users leave for Windows 10 en masse”, but neither is true. All that happened is that those Chinese players came back for one specific game this month compared to last month, and you can see that by the increase in Simplified Chinese users.
There are plenty of people, regardless of location, that use Simplified Chinese and wouldn’t be outliers, but you’re better off collecting that number during a down month, and you can get a better representation of actual Linux usage over time by selecting one language that isn’t Simplified Chinese, like English.
I’m not saying that Chinese players only play Dota 2 and PUBG. I’m saying that measurably, the biggest swings in the survey come from Chinese players who only play a couple of the biggest games and nothing else, and they play on homogenized hardware at gaming centers running the same graphics card and operating system. In these same ebbs and flows, people write articles saying “Linux usage surges” and “Windows 11 users leave for Windows 10 en masse”, but neither is true. All that happened is that those Chinese players came back for one specific game this month compared to last month, and you can see that by the increase in Simplified Chinese users.
There are plenty of people, regardless of location, that use Simplified Chinese and wouldn’t be outliers, but you’re better off collecting that number during a down month, and you can get a better representation of actual Linux usage over time by selecting one language that isn’t Simplified Chinese, like English.