Before you start making plans to evict your current rig, I want to explain how the Steam Hardware Survey actually works. Rather than representing every player that uses the storefront, the monthly census instead uses a small percentage of participants who’ve opted in as a sample. It’s anything but representative of all 154 million active users, meaning the statistic above isn’t an absolute.
Does the author know how *survey sample sizes work?
Do I?
Is it because it’s opt in or opt out?
That’s just not how statistics work. You never get 100% of the subjects to participate. But you get (in Steam’s case) an enormous sample size, that very likely represents the vast majority of gamers.
It’s probably skewed by how many of us have consoles more powerful than our “gaming” PC’s. I don’t know many PS5 or Xbox Series X owners that are bothering with a more powerful PC. Give us something that has a chance in hell of bringing-in some converts.
That said, I’m not talking about myself - my consoles are all at least a generation behind, but even then, beating those is not such a low bar once you take the smoothness and consistency of the user-experience into account.
I did the math during the GPU price insanity
It was cheaper to buy a steam deck, ps5 AND Xbox series x than a gaming PC
I’m fine with that and now I’m seriously looking at the Steam Machine vs Framework Desktop as my next “PC” for the two dozen or so games that are much better on non-console hardware and the Deck can’t run properly