Steam Hardware and Software Survey (May 2017)

Breaking News: Valve deny steam survey to AMD users to artificially increase Nvidia stats.

 

Why not ask the better question as to why Steam doesn't ask everyone to participate in the survey? What do they have to hide if they survey all the users?

 

Nah.

More like Valve doesn't give a shit if there's some bug in their query code resulting in stupid numbers for lots of stuff, not just graphics cards.


Valve nowadays just runs a very successful e-store and maintains a MOBA.
Providing accurate statistics on hardware usage isn't exactly their core activity. Nor is making games BTW.

 

You'd still complain about the numbers due to the fact that the survey was opt-in.

 

I have no horse in this race so knock off the snarky attitude and face reality.

 

Because it would be Big Brother and the wailing and lamentation of users would commence.....
Of course the same people ignore that Valve has the mechanisms in place waiting to be activated anyway
But then I would opt out myself and moan if it was mandatory lol; probably do not do it in an efficient way and just the principle of giving information access to a large corporation, which is probably also the perception by many clients.

 

Really curious, but honest question: Did you participate on one of the machines, namely the gaming machine and not on the other? It would only make sense for a survey, to only ask you on a machine where you've never taken the survey before.

 

I participated on both in the past (at some point the Surface even made sense because I had been playing Civ VI on both platforms (cloud saving rocks!)), but that was almost a year ago and most times it'll ask me in that single day in the month that I started up Steam in my Surface just to update and check some promotions.

 

There goes my theory

 

It's possible the Finns independently came up with this, but it's not specific to Finnish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

 

It's also a popular saying in Poland!
You can use statistics to prove almost anything given right set of data and search parameters

 

Never looked into it's etymology, could be just translated version of that which just happened to pick up here (the translation I did fin>eng wasn't exactly spot on either to give the impression the saying has in finnish)

 

You can't proof anything empirically or with statistics, only disproof. /nitpick

 

Omg! They are killing asians!

 

LOL, I wonder if PUBG going 1.0 has broken the Chinese Steam takeover.
It's quite interesting how with 15% plunge in Chinese the video card dynamic shifted: RX4xx jumped up, RX580 made a return (debut?) on the rankings, a lot of mid/low-tier Nvidia cards plummeted, while Nivida high-end (980ti/1070/1080/1080ti) massively surged. On the CPU side, AMD actually increased sampled installment base.

I have to say, I am quite shocked at how poor AMD's market penetration (both CPU and GPU) seems to be; on the other hand some HUGE growth opportunities once they solve whatever the bottlenecks are over there.

 

I am quite shocked at how some people insist on using the hardware survey as proof for "poor market penetration". I guess it just helps the narrative.


But oh boy that RX 480 went from 0.29% in November to a whopping 0.51% in December.
A massive 76% increase in marketshare for a card that stopped being produced 8 months ago.
What a miracle.

Not to mention that 6 year-old Geforce GTS 450 with a 50% surge in marketshare. Still going strong!

 

There is nothing shocking about it. For most of the year, there has been a huge influx of Chinese users on Steam and corresponding increase in certain Nvidia/Intel SKUs installment base samples. This month, the trends reversed, and lo and behold, the observation changed accordingly.

From statistical point of view, the very things you perceive as a weakness are actually a strength as they highlight strong, consistent correlations in the observation.

If the SKU rate increases and decreases in almost perfect lockstep with number of Chinese Steam users, it is perfectly reasonable to infer a popularity of particular hardware in China (or at least the subset of Chinese PC users who use Steam).

 

Steam Hardware Survey: Windows 7 and GeForce GTX 1060 Lead the Pack

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/st...ows-7-and-geforce-gtx-1060-lead-the-pack.html

 

Not that surprising when you consider the install base for Steam, or at least the people who choose to accept being surveyed when given the chance.

Here's the important detail. Simplified Chinese is the most common language. And not by a little bit, but by a massive amount (49.04%).

That's a LOT of cheap and/or old (recycled and used) computers being used in the survey.

Regards,
SB

 

And importantly a lot of pirated Windows 7, likely heavily skewing the OS numbers compared to the West.