Steam Hardware Survey Was Wrong

rgMekanic

[H]ard|News
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,943
Every month Steam posts it's Steam Hardware & Software Survey, giving data on what hardware and software are Steam users running. While it has long been a bit questionable about the validity of the data, The Tech Report's Wayne Manion has posted an article today explaining that the last few months of stats were wrong.

In the latest round of the survey, there were massive changes, with AMD picking up a large percentage in both GPU and CPU, as well as Windows 10 64-bit gaining over 17%, and English users going up over 11%. As it turns out, the way PCs in net cafes around the world are administered, caused them to be counted multiple times. While the article states that Valve's engineers thought that they had prevented this very thing from happening, it obviously did not.

If only someone had told us that the stats from the survey could be significantly wrong earlier... oh wait.

Personally I've always been suspect of the Steam Hardware survey, purely based on my own experiences. I've been using Steam since I was required to install it for Half Life 2, back when it was so terrible it was loathed more than uPlay is today, yet I can count on 1 hand the amount of times I have been prompted to take the survey. Add to that the lack of any information about numbers polled and the like, and you have a recipe for data to be easily manipulated.

The company says it has taken these details into account and that the latest results are more representative of true state of the gaming-PC install base. As a result, we suggest taking the deltas presented in the latest set of results with a boulder of salt.
 
I've gotten asked like twice a year, for awhile now. Then again, I'm always on the damn platform and "own" over 1200 titles. Not that has anything to do with it, but it might have something to do with the amount of interaction you have with it. I generally try not to do the survey off my side PC in MD. I rather it count my main one in Alaska.
 
Fry-Im-Shocked-Futurama.gif?zoom=2.gif
 
I've lost count of how many times I've done the Steam survey, also on Steam since HL2.
 
they get a lot more numbers if they did not make it opt in but opt out

or at least have 2 types one that is basic info hardware platform specific like CPU/core count, RAM, GPU, screen size and then a software+more detailed info survey (asking each time to do the survey does not really give a good overall steam survey (sure i not seen steam survey for a long time)
 
Considering the usage of the numbers, I don't think double counting is necessarily a bad way to go here. So long as it's counting unique gamers and the hardware they are using. Useless for hardware sales figures, but for a developer targeting a customer base it's relevant.
 
  • Like
Reactions: risc
like this
Why did I get auto played with you and some super annoying girl playing Hunt? All I wanted to do was read the comments for this article. Is that how it works now? I thought that was just the main page, which I’m fine with. Because Hunt = what I do.
 
Then again, I'm always on the damn platform and "own" over 1200 titles.

Wow, I've been buying from Steam since almost the beginning and only have 400 titles, with the last year or so being the most I've probably spent on Steam content picking up over 100 VR titles.
 
Wow, none of the usual suspects jumped in with some conspiracy theory of why Windows 10 usage skyrocketed?

Funny to see the vast majority of users (over 99%) have 'unspecified' network speed. What a useful metric!
 
Wow, I've been buying from Steam since almost the beginning and only have 400 titles, with the last year or so being the most I've probably spent on Steam content picking up over 100 VR titles.

It's embarrassing how much I own. And, I didn't start my collection until 08. So, there were years I didn't buy from.
 
wait.. the steam hardware survey is an opt-in thing? I always thought it was something that happened as part of running steam, that it reported back what hardware/software was running.
 
wait.. the steam hardware survey is an opt-in thing? I always thought it was something that happened as part of running steam, that it reported back what hardware/software was running.
Nope. A little pop up comes up asking if you want to participate.
 
yet I can count on 1 hand the amount of times I have been prompted to take the survey.

Yeah I've been asked to take part in the survey I think twice since I first installed Steam in 2004 when the ATI bundle was happening.
 
Back
Top