Interesting Steam August Hardware Survey

So the August Steam Survey is out.

And it looks like over 65% of PC gamers still play at 1080p (or less)

In fact, the most common GPU is nvidia 1650, and with its smaller 1050/ti brothers constitute more than 25% of total. Only a combined 1.6% of PC players carry 2080 Super and 2080ti, and its a safe bet that if you’ve got a 2080+, you are on steam too, so that’s a total. About 2% of all PC gamers can game at 4k.

To be honest I found these stats a little bit too funny, because on one hand I saw the NVIDIA presentation pushing for 8K and all that jazz, and on the other hand I see every day the common narrative on gaming forums, “I will only get a playstation since I play all xbox games maxed-out on ma’ PC” :laughing:

What do you guys think? Could both the PCMR and the PS fans be pulling our leg here, or what? :grin:

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I guess the problem here is that Steam is available in some 230+ countries? That’s an awfully deep and wide cohort to compare against an (in relation) small but vocal group of platform warriors :slight_smile:

Take Russia, for example - published data in 2013 showed 98 percent of all Russia’s 46.4 million gamers played on the PC platform.

You might be surprised by which countries are Steam’s biggest users

So a massive hardcore PC base. But then again, the average salary in Russia is RUB104,000 / USD$1,381. Perhps not the sort of income that I imagine makes you comfortable splashing ~$800 dollarbucks on a video card.

By the by, this seven day rolling interactive Steam usage map is neat

STEAM DOWNLOAD STATS

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This is the interesting thing about the perception of PC gaming. We tend to assume the majority of people game on top of the line hardware when the opposite is true and a large percentage of people game on very modest hardware instead.

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So yeah, take China - massive representation, number one country represented on steam - and with a USD equivalent monthly salary of USD$1,102.

It’s unsurprising how modest the average (Steam) gaming setup is.

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We need numbers for this because percentage are relatives

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PC Gaming is an incredibly diverse space, and that’s one of the reasons why the platform is so strong. You can play PC games on anything from a cheap laptop to a $3000+ PC. Steam has thousands of games which span all levels of gaming capabilities.

I’m not sure why anyone would expect anything else.

You’re right - The caveat is we don’t know how many users actually fill out the hardware survey, or how representative it is of the Steam userbase as a whole.

However assuming there’s ~21 million steam users logged in on average, to get a representative sample size / 2% margin of error / 95% confidence level, I think polling logic suggests that you would “only” need some 2,401 systems to respond to the hardware survey.

I’m not Steam Scientist, but I’m guessing a helluva lot more that that opt in to the survey?

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I’ve been googling to find out some numbers. It seems that if you take out the spambot created accounts, it looks like the real number is around or less than 100 million. And this not excluding the dupe accounts, since steam allows anonymous account creation. A good month I found out had 90 mil. accounts signing at least once. Again the articles I found talked about the steam strong drive from Asia, like you pointed out.

Now, those with powerful h/w are much more likely to participate in the survey than those playing on intel HD, so as I wrote on the original post, the powerful h/w owners surveyed most probably are the …grand total of powerful PC h/w owners, while the opposite, the weak h/w owners are much less likely to participate.

Anybody who can dig-in for more numbers, that might be good information

Online there is always a lot of talk about the high end. But the expensive 20xx-series didn’t sell that well and it was not by accident that Jensen Huang specifically adressed 10xx-owners in his last keynote.

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By the way, to pair this with the current xbox news, dat series S would fit like a glove to the vast majority of PC players, even as a cheap upgrade

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Yep. You’re not wrong. I have a feeling Series S will sell very well indeed.

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