What the Hell Happened to the Steam Hardware Survey?

Megalith

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ExtremeTech claims that the Steam Hardware Survey is terribly broken. While it has never been perfect, the metrics published over the last few weeks are radically different and paint an allegedly flawed picture of the PC market. Readers who have chimed in say it is due to a surge related to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds opening in China.

OEMs have not sold hundreds of millions of systems over and above quarterly projections to transform the market so quickly. The bulk of Intel laptops on the market are still dual-core + Hyper-Threading; the 8th generation family has launched and is definitely in-market, but customers would have to replacing hardware at a ferocious pace to show such dramatic changes so quickly — and nothing we’ve heard from any of the analysts that track this for a living show any such changes.
 
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Simplified Chinese
56.12%
+26.58%

This is the underlying issue. Steam has a flood of Chinese data that is 4 core intel with nvidia on win 7. Is that real or some odd glitch because of the great firewall of China? Id cut the Chineese market out of the data and put them in their own graphs for now as they are obviously causing unusual havoc in Steams data.
 
And the Chinese spam steam with cheap hardware. Must be WOW Gold farmers.
I would expand that to any MMO farmers, but the game farmers data suddenly released by the great firewall may be the cause of this as the underground shops doing this would order mass volumes of the same thing as cheap as they could.
 
Language
Simplified Chinese
56.12%
+26.58%

This is the underlying issue. Steam has a flood of Chinese data that is 4 core intel with nvidia on win 7. Is that real or some odd glitch because of the great firewall of China? Id cut the Chineese market out of the data and put them in their own graphs for now as they are obviously causing unusual havoc in Steams data.
Meet the new lowest common denominator. Everyone wants those Chinese market sales, so get prepared for a new batch of AAA Win7 games with warmed over assets from 2010.

Seriously though, publishers and investors will look at these metrics and require that games hit the widest possible audience.
 
Well unless they hacked into steam they are a part of it. Maybe separate the information by continent? I would still want the info on each person that uses steam though. China should not be shunned based on their numbers alone.
 
Or perhaps it's accurate and we're seeing a picture of a global market instead of the traditional North America + english speaking friends focus.

Is there a way to check the hardware survey to a specific locality?
 
Why We Think The SHS is Broken

There are three possibilities in play here. One, the SHS is terribly broken. Two, the SHS was terribly broken and has just been corrected. Three, the SHS’s data processing and aggregation are being processed by a mentally deficient giraffe on an old VAX terminal. We’re leaning towards #1 and/or #3.

Excellent reporting. Maybe it's a mentally deficient giraffe on an old VAX terminal writing this article.
 
Meet the new lowest common denominator. Everyone wants those Chinese market sales, so get prepared for a new batch of AAA Win7 games with warmed over assets from 2010.

Seriously though, publishers and investors will look at these metrics and require that games hit the widest possible audience.
Hmm given that the average Chinese man makes 4,700 dollars a year. I don’t think AMD vs Intel or Nvidia vs AMD is on his mind. Them suddenly being listed as over half the steam market is causing information distortion. I agree with the separate regions in steam so we can see the different changes per major market more clearly.
 
So was Steam recently opened to the Chinese market? If not then why the sudden change in hardware? If so, why put everyone from different countries together, it throws off stats.
 
If I had to guess they are monitizing pubg and since that's where the money can be made they cobbled tohgether a bunch of low spec machines and are farming/boting the game.

Kind of lime the wall of cellphones with a person writing hundreds of reviews for cash
 
Hmm given that the average Chinese man makes 4,700 dollars a year. I don’t think AMD vs Intel or Nvidia vs AMD is on his mind. Them suddenly being listed as over half the steam market is causing information distortion. I agree with the separate regions in steam so we can see the different changes per major market more clearly.
Per Wiki, China's middle-class population (defined as those with annual income of between US$10,000 and US$60,000) was >300 million by 2012. There are plenty of Chinese who can buy computer hardware.
 
Excellent reporting. Maybe it's a mentally deficient giraffe on an old VAX terminal writing this article.

Nothin' wrong with old VAX machines! I'd love one to play with, along with three phase power.
 
Language
Simplified Chinese
56.12%
+26.58%

This is the underlying issue. Steam has a flood of Chinese data that is 4 core intel with nvidia on win 7. Is that real or some odd glitch because of the great firewall of China? Id cut the Chineese market out of the data and put them in their own graphs for now as they are obviously causing unusual havoc in Steams data.

How so? If anything, they'd be providing correction to the Steam data, which would have been more distorted before, rather than now.

So was Steam recently opened to the Chinese market? If not then why the sudden change in hardware? If so, why put everyone from different countries together, it throws off stats.

How does it throw off stats? I would say that the stats were more thrown off before the recent large addition of more gamer system data.
 
Meet the new lowest common denominator. Everyone wants those Chinese market sales, so get prepared for a new batch of AAA Win7 games with warmed over assets from 2010.

Seriously though, publishers and investors will look at these metrics and require that games hit the widest possible audience.

No need to worry, because the influx of the Chinese specs actually jacked up the lowest common denominator across the board:


Last months specs:

Processor speed: 2.3 - 2.69 Ghz (~16.5%)
Processor speed: 2.7 - 2.99 Ghz (11.02%)
Processor speed: 3.0 - 3.29 Ghz (~19.4%)
Processor speed: 3.3 - 3.69 Ghz (~21%)

Processor cores: 2 (~36.5%)
Processor cores: 4 (57%)

Most common OS: Windows 10

1920x1080 resolution (~66.80%)
2560x1440 resolution (2.68%)


This month's most common specs:


Processor speed: 2.3 - 2.69 Ghz (10.31%)
Processor speed: 2.7 - 2.99 Ghz (15.96%)
Processor speed: 3.0 - 3.29 Ghz (30.93%)
Processor speed: 3.3 - 3.69 Ghz (22.04%)

Processor cores: 2 (27.07%)
Processor cores: 4 (69.55%)

Most common OS: Windows 7

1920x1080 resolution (71.38%)
2560x1440 resolution (3.40%)

1 GB VRAM -9.29%
2 GB VRAM +8.63%
3 GB VRAM +3.73%
4 GB VRAM +3.38%



Meet the new lowest common denominator, which just received a major jump above the previous lowest common denominator. It seems that the average Chinese gamer has a better system than the average North American gamer, and that the average Chinese gamer also has better discretion when it comes to choosing which OS to run :p
 
How so? If anything, they'd be providing correction to the Steam data, which would have been more distorted before, rather than now.



How does it throw off stats? I would say that the stats were more thrown off before the recent large addition of more gamer system data.
Depends on a few factors. Is this real regular consumer purchasing that is actually showing us the preferences of the Chinese market? Or are we seeing just how many people are enslaved to farming in MMO's and other game systems like slaves? Windows 7 is just illegally pirated there which they have a harder time doing with Windows 10 and it's cost prohibitive. Which also doesn't help with actual consumer purchasing data where real money is spent on the OS not the 30,000,000th illegal key used in China. If China was a truly open free market that was making normal market purchasing decisions I would agree with you. Yet, it is not.
 
Meet the new lowest common denominator. Everyone wants those Chinese market sales, so get prepared for a new batch of AAA Win7 games with warmed over assets from 2010.

Seriously though, publishers and investors will look at these metrics and require that games hit the widest possible audience.
That depends on if that market actually "buys" the games. The Chinese market is all about pirating everything. Plus they are praised for sticking it to the West in their culture for doing so. Now if you can get the Chinese to actually pay for something in mass numbers even at a lower rate well then you may be on to something. That isn't easy to do. Especially in the software or movie market.
 
No need to worry, because the influx of the Chinese specs actually jacked up the lowest common denominator across the board:


[snip]



Meet the new lowest common denominator, which just received a major jump above the previous lowest common denominator. It seems that the average Chinese gamer has a better system than the average North American gamer, and that the average Chinese gamer also has better discretion when it comes to choosing which OS to run :p

I would guess that the influx of Chinese gamers has swamped the previous large group of shitty laptops that gamers have Steam installed on. If publishers were able to segregate obviously subpar laptops in the past, and were ignoring those data, then this could still be a lowering of the lowest common denominator. The average gaming PC still probably sees a decrease in specs.

If publishers are just looking at the raw values, then I agree with you that this represents an increase in many specs. Given how little I think of most publishers and investors, this could be the more likely scenario.
 
Why do we care??

WHY U NO LIKEY STEAM SURVEY!

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