dirtyferretthe STEAM survey is not a publized scientific article so everything after that in your statement is false since your statement begins with a false assumption

But you are taking their "statistics" as if they are from verified source and even articles are written about it as if it was chiseled into stone.
Without raw data or at least publicized method of their gathering and processing, they are not verifiable and trustworthy.
You are blindly believing what is served to you. Thus me calling this "steam HW survey" in better case a PR or in worse active propaganda.
Your blind belief in Valve forces me to speculate: "Thus Steam "survey" may be an advertisement space, privately sold to HW manufacturers." - now you have a possible explanation why third party could falsify results to their liking. XD
Always look for where money leads ("Cui bono?"), companies exist to make them. If Valve does not want reveal its methodology, it is because there are money in it.

Robin SeinaBut you are taking their "statistics" as if they are from verified source

they are from a verified source, Valve. If they were unverified we would not know from whom they came from.

Robin Seinaabout it as if it was chiseled into stone

I merely stated it was data, you are the one tossing a hissy fit online because their data does not match your beliefs as inaccurate as your beliefs are

mamaIf I collect all the green hats and conclude that all hats are green there is very little value in the conclusion

yet that is not what they said, in fact they have never stated any conclusion. people have concluded (and often inaccurately) things from their data

In fact all they have said using your example is based on an opt-in survey, respondents had 15% green hats. You ran with the "all hats are green conclusion" and obviously inaccurately.

Robin SeinaBut you are taking their "statistics" as if they are from verified source and even articles are written about it as if it was chiseled into stone.
Without raw data or at least publicized method of their gathering and processing, they are not verifiable and trustworthy.
You are blindly believing what is served to you. Thus me calling this "steam HW survey" in better case a PR or in worse active propaganda.
Your blind belief in Valve forces me to speculate: "Thus Steam "survey" may be an advertisement space, privately sold to HW manufacturers." - now you have a possible explanation why third party could falsify results to their liking. XD
Always look for where money leads ("Cui bono?"), companies exist to make them. If Valve does not want reveal its methodology, it is because there are money in it.

But no one is offering any evidence at all that Steam is in collusion with Nvidia in any way.
No one yet has offered a shred of evidence that Steam is in collusion with Nvidia for financial gain using the Survey results or even how the Survey results have any value at all to Nvidia that they would deem it worthwhile to pay Steam to falsify the Survey results. All I see in this entire thread is speculation that Steam must be doing that.

dirtyferretthey are from a verified source, Valve. If they were unverified we would not know from whom they came from.


yet that is not what they said, in fact they have never stated any conclusion, people have concluded (and often inaccurately) things from their data

Please, don't play on being dumb. I obviously meant independent verification of results, not verification of company.

OK. Then I try to explain it another way. Lets take data from Intels presentation of Tiger Lake. Specifically the U series. On specifications the Intel wrote TDP 15 W. Then showed graphs with results measured with TDP 28 W, which wasn't detailed in presentation itself, but deep buried on the Intels website. Also the same series of CPU has a PL2 of 64 W, a fact which Intel at the time of presentation omitted entirely. Is Intel a verified source when it just presented its new (at the time) CPU, but nobody else has them in hand? Is it still verified source when truth came into light?

64KBut no one is offering any evidence at all that Steam is in collusion with Nvidia in any way.
No one yet has offered a shred of evidence that Steam is in collusion with Nvidia for financial gain using the Survey results or even how the Survey results have any value at all to Nvidia that they would deem it worthwhile to pay Steam to falsify the Survey results. All I see in this entire thread is speculation that Steam must be doing that.

But no one has offered an evidence to disprove any speculations like that also. This goes on for long years already. Why did not Valve despite all the critics not revealed its methodology? It would silence all such speculations but they did not done so.

Robin SeinaOK. Then I try to explain it another way. Lets take data from Intels presentation of Tiger Lake. Specifically the U series. On specifications the Intel wrote TDP 15 W. Then showed graphs with results measured with TDP 28 W, which wasn't detailed in presentation itself, but deep buried on the Intels website. Also the same series of CPU has a PL2 of 64 W, a fact which Intel at the time of presentation omitted entirely. Is Intel a verified source when it just presented its new (at the time) CPU, but nobody else has them in hand? Is it still verified source when truth came into light?

Intel sells CPUs. They have a motivation to be deceitful to sell more CPUs

Nvidia sells GPUs. They have a motivation to be deceitful to sell more GPUs

Steam doesn't sell either or their Survey results. They have no motivation to be deceitful about Survey results.

I will readily agree that both Intel and Nvidia have been deceitful in the past for financial gain but still no evidence why Steam has a motivation to be deceitful with Survey results.

Robin Seina. I obviously meant independent verification of results, not verification of company.

look after reading all your responses I'm going by the fact that statistics are a new concept to you of wich you have no understanding until proven otherwise

64KSteam doesn't sell either or their Survey results. They have no motivation to be deceitful about Survey results.

I will readily agree that both Intel and Nvidia have been deceitful in the past for financial gain but still no evidence why Steam has a motivation to be deceitful with Survey results.

There is also no evidence saying otherwise. It leaves large space for any imaginations. Valve also has easy way to disprove any speculations. Release the methodology. It had not done so in years.
On other side are multiple reports of survey poping up in internet cafés or not at all, despite user changing multiple PCs. Those news are multi-source for suspicions about Valves methodology and reason to doubt it.

dirtyferretlook after reading all your responses I'm going by the fact that statistics are a new concept to you of wich you have no understanding until proven otherwise

Please, can you publish links to your publications? Your own understanding of statistics is very interesting too. I like to be amused.

BTW, is here somewhere an option to ignore/hide your posts? You obviously don't have anything constructive to say. I'm tired of you (user dirtyferret).

I had to do some looking around because in the almost 40 years of being online I have never ignored any user but I found out how. Scroll your cursor over my avatar and you will see an option to ignore me.

But I will leave you with this. Here in the USA we are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Valve is well within their rights to not bother with anyone's speculation of their guilt until even a shred of evidence is offered that they are guilty of falsifying the results of their Survey for financial gain.

64KI had to do some looking around because in the almost 40 years of being online I have never ignored any user but I found out how. Scroll your cursor over my avatar and you will see an option to ignore me.

But I will leave you with this. Here in the USA we are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Valve is well within their rights to not bother with anyone's speculation of their guilt until even a shred of evidence is offered that they are guilty of falsifying the results of their Survey for financial gain.

Thank you. You have rational arguments, with you things can be discussed in polite way. On other hand user dirtyferret is getting my ignore. He's irrational.

In Czech constitution is stated the same principal, "the innocent until proven guilty". Yet, we have author law, which takes fees from sale of media (CD, DVD, HDD, SSD, photocopy, USB thumbdrives) on presumptions it will be used for pirating of protected content. That is in a direct opposition of this principle. But nobody does anything about it. Also if you look at your politicians, they are considered guilty until proven otherwise? At least the most media sources seems to presume so.

I would imagine Steam runs the survey to enable the platform as a distribution format to better understand it's active user base's hardware configs. No point steam selling AAA's if the majority of it's users are using PC components that are only capable of playing 'pong'.

In fact, I'm correct - this is at the top of the Steam Survey blurb:

Steam conducts a monthly survey to collect data about what kinds of computer hardware and software our customers are using. Participation in the survey is optional, and anonymous. The information gathered is incredibly helpful to us as we make decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make and products to offer.

That's a slam dunk.

There's zero requirement for Steam/Valve to release their sampling methodology as it isn't a theory that they put forward for peer review. To equate the Steam hardware survey as some form of scientific paper is poor reaonsing. Scientific work requires peer review (and transparency) to enable it to be verified as a point of accepted scientific theory. The Steam hardware survey isn't trying to do anything like that. It's a snapshot of use that it uses for whatever purpose. It's certainly not PR or propaganda. Propaganda is something used in active manipulation. Steam barely farts a whisper about its hardware survey. We only see it via these tech sites.

Much prefer to hang my hat on the steam survey results than mindfactory sales...

dirtyferretstatistics are not inaccurate unless falsified, people can have inaccurate takes on statistics.

That's complete nonsense, statistics can totally be inaccurate without being falsified.

Robin SeinaBut you are taking their "statistics" as if they are from verified source and even articles are written about it as if it was chiseled into stone.
Without raw data or at least publicized method of their gathering and processing, they are not verifiable and trustworthy.
You are blindly believing what is served to you. Thus me calling this "steam HW survey" in better case a PR or in worse active propaganda.
Your blind belief in Valve forces me to speculate: "Thus Steam "survey" may be an advertisement space, privately sold to HW manufacturers." - now you have a possible explanation why third party could falsify results to their liking. XD
Always look for where money leads ("Cui bono?"), companies exist to make them. If Valve does not want reveal its methodology, it is because there are money in it.

I don't know if this is true, but it is indeed suspicious... Out of all my firends and family, the only ones that own nvidia cards either have a laptop with a GTX 3050 or 3060 mobile, or own older generation cards like the 1080 - you know, from a time when mid-high end was still affordable. The rest own AMD cards. My cousin bought a 6650XT - he wanted a 3060 but it was more expensive without offering better performance (the 3060 is actually 14% slower on average according to techpowerup) - so he went with an AMD card instead, witch he got last winter for 295$. The cheapest 3060 was over 400. Maybe things are the other way around in other countries? Similar deal for a couple of friends. They wanted to upgrade - both chose the Radeon 6700XT (there was a sale on powercolor cards during the holidays, I picked up a Red Devil 6900XT myself) due to vastly better price / performance compared to nvidia alternatives. One of my mates bought an Ark A750 for around 275$ and he's pretty happy with it after the latest driver update. Considering he upgraded from a GTX 1050 it's no surprise.

Hell, over here, nvidia is asking for 365$ for the 3050.... you can get a much faster 6650xt or 6700 non xt for that.... anyone doing the least bit of price performance research (and we all do, it's the Balkans and we're payid poorly) will go for the best deal.

evernessinceNot sure steam has ever made the claim that the steam survey is random nor have they ever publicly disclosed the algorithm used to select participants.

Selecting participants in a survey is just one part of what makes a survey accurate, the how, when, and why are all equally important. Particularly when you are talking about polling virtual participants, where you can not exactly validate that each survey response is from a system that hasn't been polled before. In addition steam has a very strict data collection policy, which surely makes fingerprinting unique systems even harder.

Add to that, we know for a fact that steam has had ongoing issues and has revised multiple past surveys due to inaccuracies. At least the ones they have caught as far as they know. The steam survey is only really useful as puff pieces for tech and gaming news websites, anyone using it otherwise is doing so because they are either ignorant or it validates their pre-concieved notions.



There are three problems with this conclusion

1) Blizzard's products were disabled in China on January 23rd. Why would we see a jump now and not in the two months in between?

2) You assume that every person switching from Activision / Blizzard's platform are being polled. If the survey is random, it would not poll all the new Chinese users at once and not within such a specific timeframe. If it is then it's not remotely random.

3) You assume that said users didn't already have a steam account. The overlap between users who have a Activision / Blizzard account who also have a steam account is likely extremely high.

Thank you for your pointless rant.

Firstly, Valve never reversed any survey due to being inaccurate, it was always accurate within the tracked population, the issue was that sometimes, the tracked population included also additional hw which was not supposed to be there, for example, internet cafes or different regions.

No one is whining either, that among gaming machines, there are also included work, and school laptops/pcs which are also inflating and potentially skewing the data.

It doesn't matter that some machines are counted more than once, the entry doesn't have to be unique. You do nothing but create pointless conspiracy theories because your favourite hw manufacturer's market share decreased. Deal with it, no one cares.

If you have a large enough sample, and do the process randomly or you use the same methodology which is semi-random, you get the correct result closely minoring reality within the confidence interval and the fact, they got it SOMETIMES "wrong" despite doing the survey for years, it literally proves they do IT RIGHT, because that's how statistics and probability works and you are only publicly exposing your serious lack of knowledge. Now go complain that politics pools cannot be trusted, because they are sometimes wrong despite THAT BEING THE FEATURE AND ISSUE DUE TO METHODOLOGY. If you had any clue what you are talking about, you would UNDERSTAND, that the data presented are not hard facts and there is a chance they are completely wrong and that every time we do such surveys we do talk about probabilities being within the range of the population we try to analyze and survey.

OH NO, they were "wrong" in the past. THAT'S THE FEATURE and limitation of statistics. If you wanted to be accurate 99,99999% of the time, Valve would have to provide you with such ridiculous % intervals, which would tell you literally nothing. In your case, if I were to estimate your height and the height of the people here, in order to have extremely high confidence in the result, I would have to say that you height is somewhere between 10cm and 250cm.

By all means, if you are such an expert, provide us with a valid methodology which is right all the time when you are surveying only a very small sample. No, there isn't such a thing. Bye. Any discussion about the matter with you is entirely pointless because you do not know the fundamentals.

Last warning... stop the personal attacks/insults... discuss the topic not the person.
Stop the arguing drama.
Discuss the topic with civility.

JimmyDoogsPlaying any game at max setting 1080p and even running the hardest to run PC game Last of Us (2022) at 37 FPS in 1440p. Better performance than a PS5. Of course you might get lag spikes unless you have a processor and RAM that competes with PS5 but still not bad IMO. The 3060 shaped up to be a fairly decent card despite some of the pricing hold backs and it's not even a ti card.

RX 6700 XT is miles ahead of it.....

6700 XT is amazing too. I'm very impressed by Mid-low end cards of last gen is all I meant guys lol. I'm just saying things are getting better in the tech world. I love AMD, NVIDIA, Sony, Nintendo and MS. :)

ColddeckedI'm going to go out on a limb and say the vast majority of these 3060's are mobile versions.

no they're desktop 3060s. the mobile variant of the 3060 is listed as "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU" at 3.03%.

the 3060 is only 10% meaningless statistic, if i that the top 50% of gpus and average the performance of that its closer to a 2060.
most people do not have any good gpu, this is so broken and we need to fix it.
but at the other hand anyone interested in pc will save up for what they need.