Windows 7 Market Share on the Rise again at Steam

Huh?

The steam hardware survey is sent out to a indeterminate number of people each month. The results of the survey are compared to the previous month. With 125M active users the sample size doesn't even have to be that large for a 95% confidence rating.

Developers then use that data to make decisions about the games they are building - not ones already sold. They can sit there with reasonable accuracy and say "The vast majority of steam users have less than 4 cores, thus we shouldn't make a game that absolutely requires 4 cores for an enjoyable experience" or "The vast majority of steam gamers are using 1080p and below" or "The vast majority of steam gamers have a 1060/480 or weaker". You don't need high levels of confidence in order to draw those conclusions and those are the conclusions valve designed it for.

 

Steam survey "only" matters regarding PC gaming because everyone that games on a PC probably has a Steam account. For a complete picture about all PC hardware available right now, only MS can provide it, like you said.

 

The survey is optional and it's actually not requesting info from users every month. This time (as others mentioned), it also seemed that DX8 GPUs were on the rise :infinity:

 

All true but do you know any other company that provides all this info like Valve does? Or any other company, with the exception of MS, that can provide info like this correctly? I don´t. Also do you think other stats provided by Steam, like core counts, most used monitor resolutions and Nvidia/AMD market share are also wrong?

I think that Steam survey provides a good picture of the actual hardware gamers are using right now but that´s my opinion, nothing else. If you want to dismiss it that´s up to you, no problem.

 

No they can't.

If it only compares to the previous months data, that is even worse.

As i said, this information does not tell anything useful to anyone. It has no actual information in it other then "Well this is what was found this month, in an extremely small selection of devices, that does not represent the whole, or represent any market trends due to not testing the same previous steam accounts from previous surveys and etc."

Again, as a developer, this is completely useless information.

How can it, when it does not survey anything useful? How can you know what people are using "right now" if you decide to only survey random people that do not present the whole? That does not work. You'll get what SOME people are using right now, but you'll get no accurate information on what MOST people are using right now or market trends (which are the most important thing when making software/games is to see WHERE people are going)

 

Like with every poll, it means almost nothing unless we know the frequency it's taken, the sample, how the sample changes between takes and all the rest that need to be taken into account. Because it can be fairly accurate, or completely bungled. I actually don't pay a lot of attention to it.

 

It's always great reading the excuses but NMS is also showing windows 7 continuing to climb every month.

 

I can't imagine that you're suggesting that the only way to conduct any poll or survey is to survey literally everyone you're targeting. You're not suggesting that, right? That would be idiotic.

 

I suggest you take a statistics class or spend a few minutes on the wikipedia page because the part of your post that I bolded is completely asinine. You most definitely can survey a subset of random people and get within an extremely high level of confidence that your answers are accurate. The rest of your post is predicated on the sampling being inaccurate. I would think Valve would be intelligent enough to sample enough people to be confident in what they literally state the reason for it is:

"The information gathered is incredibly helpful to us as we make decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make and products to offer."

Almost all surveys are optional and don't request from the same people every month. That's how good surveys work, random sampling. As for DX8, the amount of DX8 GPU's that were polled probably increased. The sampling is random and has some degree of deviation which would be higher with DX8 GPU's because there are so few of them.

 

I'm assuming they mean that these days polling in general has been found out to be flawed, and not particularly accurate. If submitting to the survey was a mandatory part of steam then it would be great, but afaik it's know, so it's not good at all.

Next month will no doubt mirror last month and W10 will be back on the rise.

 

Lol, Y'all truly are PC enthusiast!

believe it or not an i3-4370/gtx960 can play any steam game better than ps4/xbox1...

Give the poor boys some credit!

 

Good surveys don't really have "random" sampling. They are properly distributed actually, and they also come with error tolerances in percentage form. None of this seems to apply for the Steam numbers we get.

 

Windows 10 has no issues for any computer user or gamer, never used a system more perfect, updates are installed in super quick time. Haven't used system restore since Windows 7, haven't had to tweak any configurations at all, totally trouble free.
People that have alleged "problems" have a problem it's not Windows 10.

 

Well.. I went back to Windows 8.1 after giving 10 a pretty long go... I just got frustrated with it and went back to use my pc properly.

 

If you run only Windows 10, install only ms store apps, do not change a thing in system and not use any specialized 3rd party programs then Windows 10 runs very well... But if you want start using Windows 10 like you used Windows 7m run your favorite antivir, firewall, change security options, run specialized programs then you starting have problems, problems what you not have in previous system. So some peoples do not like Windows 10 and going back, because they want do more than just run os itself...

 

No issues with all the above.

I uninstalled the Store and Xbox App, installed NOD32 like i have for the past 10 years, installed the same software as on Windows 7. Changed some settings in Group Policy, disabled some services like i did in Win 7... It all works fine.

You're just looking for problems that arn't there.

 

Feel free to keep invalidating peoples real world experiences because you haven't had them.

 

Those people probably all "upgraded" to Windows 10.

I have a Retail copy on USB 3.0.

Never Upgrade... ever.

 

If the margin of error was that large in the steam survey, we'd be seeing the DX8 phenomenon constantly. It's accurate enough to get general hardware trends, which is what it was designed for - not solving Guru3D arguments about maketshare of products that are within .x% of eachother. It's not going to have accuracy for that.

 

Imo,that increase of dual cores because of Pentium G4560,better priced than i3.

Anyway,Windows 7 x64 still good,despite M$ weirdo patches.