Valve rolls out the results for its Steam Hardware survey every month and turns out the results weren’t as accurate as everyone thought them to be, however, Valve has fixed this issue and has also updated the April’s result for the survey.
The reason why the results weren’t accurate were because of the cyber cafe users that caused problems with the survey for last seven months. According to Valve, the fixes rolled out for Steam Hardware survey mainly focus on how computers or users are counted.
While the algorithm counted one system as one registry but, the Chinese cyber cafes were counted for more than one registry.
Around August 2017, we started seeing larger-than-usual movement in certain stats,” Valve says, “notably an increase in Windows 7 usage, an increase in quad-core CPU usage, as well as changes in CPU and GPU market share. This period also saw a large increase in the use of Simplified Chinese. All of these coincided with an increase in Steam usage in cyber cafes in Asia, whose customers were being over-counted in the survey.
This resulted in inaccurate results for Steam Hardware Survey which lowered percentages for AMD powered machines and increased the percentages for NVidia and Intel-powered machines.
With the fix already been deployed and April results fixed, AMD GPUs rose to 14.9% from 10.8% while Nvidia accounted for 75%. Same goes for the AMD CPUs which rose to 16% from 11.4% while Intel accounted for 84%. However, with the results fixed, there is not a significant increase in AMD’s share as Intel and Nvidia are still dominating.
Not only that, following the fix, Windows 10 rose to 53.1% and took the lead back while Windows 7 dropped to 36.2%.
Speaking of Steam, Valve has now added Nintendo Switch pro controller support to Steam. According to Valve, they are pleased to add the Nintendo Switch pro controller support to Steam and believe that the d-pad is ideal for fighting games and platformers.
Source: Steam
