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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.
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.
