A Look at Steam’s Latest Hardware & Software Survey

Like clockwork, Valve has once again updated the Steam “Hardware & Software Survey”, its useful report on the hardware and software gamers are equipped with. It’s been a couple of months since I last checked things out, and I’m a bit surprised at a couple of trends, and also the addition of a couple of new categories.

On the PC components side, one trend that I find interesting is that quad-core adoption is quite high, with a 15.45% increase in adoption between December 2008 and May 2010, and a 2.31% increase in particular between August and September. Interestingly, even six-core processors are on the rise, and as of September, they sit at 0.45% – which is rather impressive if you ask me. That means that roughly 1 in every 222 gamers on Steam have a six-core CPU.

For GPU’s, AMD seems to be dominating a lot of these sub-categories, as it holds the highest share of both DirectX 10 and 11 GPUs. In a similar vein, the majority of gamers have a GPU equipped with 512MB of memory (35.94%), but that’s not too far ahead of those with 1GB (30.49%). In another somewhat interesting result, almost 1% have a GPU with 1536MB of memory.

What surprises me on the software side is that Windows 7 hasn’t only slowed down in adoption, but seems to be on a small decline. In a one-month span, usage of the 64-bit version of the OS decreased by 1.88%, while the 32-bit version saw a smaller decrease of 0.58%. Windows XP on the other hand saw an increase of 1.39%. I’m not sure of the reason behind this, but it could be that Steam had attracted a large number of new users during September that affected the stats in this way. Civilization V, for example, generally has about 60,000 players per day playing via Steam, and is the first release of the game to properly support the service. This is just a theory, though.

During the summer, Valve added a software category to this survey, which for the most part sums up a list of popular applications and again gives us usage numbers. This even includes small stuff, such as Adobe’s Flash Player, which had a 96.79% install rate, with Acrobat at 73.18% trailing in second place. Firefox came in third with 63.05%, with a large number of other applications also listed. iTunes, surprisingly has a 30.73% install base, and that’s PC-exclusive (there are no Mac software stats yet).

As always, the number of stats here is almost overwhelming, so if you want to get down and dirty with a bunch of interesting numbers, be sure to check out the latest update.

Steam collects data about what kinds of computer hardware and software our customers are using. The survey data is incredibly helpful to us in that it ensures that we’re making good decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make and products to offer.