Valve published the results of the March 2024 Steam Hardware & Software Survey, revealing the most popular CPUs, GPUs, and operating systems its customers use to play various games.
I can’t find anything on the sample size. It’s not mentioned on the official page, and all the other results are armchair statisticians arguing about it in various forums. I’m guessing they want to keep that data close to their chest.
However, Steam’s charts page shows a peak of 34M players online at once over the last few days. A few different sites suggest Daily Average Users are around 60M. Let’s call it an even 50M for the sake of argument.
What would a decent sample size be without generating overwhelming amounts of data? Say, 10%? So that’s surveying 5M users.
0.3% of 5M is just 15,000 users. What if the survey just happened to pick 15k fewer Windows 11 users this time? Is that so unbelievable?
Yeah that is insanely unbelievable. Maybe a tenth of that is barely realistic but 15k of sample error would mean that valve is completely shit at selecting a good sample.
Even if their sample size is large, you’re assuming that people who are willing to respond to the survey are evenly distributed across different OS. I wouldn’t be surprised if their is a slant to this data just because it’s based on an opt in survey.
That is a good point and might be true, but statistics people deal with that kind of bias all the time and can also adjusted for it.
But yeah who knows what kind of people are responsible for these surveys at valve.
I can’t find anything on the sample size. It’s not mentioned on the official page, and all the other results are armchair statisticians arguing about it in various forums. I’m guessing they want to keep that data close to their chest.
However, Steam’s charts page shows a peak of 34M players online at once over the last few days. A few different sites suggest Daily Average Users are around 60M. Let’s call it an even 50M for the sake of argument.
What would a decent sample size be without generating overwhelming amounts of data? Say, 10%? So that’s surveying 5M users.
0.3% of 5M is just 15,000 users. What if the survey just happened to pick 15k fewer Windows 11 users this time? Is that so unbelievable?
Yeah that is insanely unbelievable. Maybe a tenth of that is barely realistic but 15k of sample error would mean that valve is completely shit at selecting a good sample.
Even if their sample size is large, you’re assuming that people who are willing to respond to the survey are evenly distributed across different OS. I wouldn’t be surprised if their is a slant to this data just because it’s based on an opt in survey.
That is a good point and might be true, but statistics people deal with that kind of bias all the time and can also adjusted for it. But yeah who knows what kind of people are responsible for these surveys at valve.