05-05-2018, 10:25 AM
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam-...37007.html
Quote:Steam designed the survey to query its users’ systems once per year, but the company discovered that Asia-based cyber cafes manage their systems in such a way that the survey could be completed multiple times per year on a single PC. This duplicated the entries multiple times, which skewed the results of the survey. Typically, we would expect an automated system to weed out multiple entries through identifying information from the host computer, but Steam either protects its users by not collecting such data, or the duplicate entries simply went undetected.
The duplicate entries led to inflated statistics for Windows 7 usage, CPU and GPU market share, and an erroneous report of a rise in the number of quad-core systems. Steam has deployed a fix to correct the issue, and the company contends that all its data from April 2018 onward will be correct.
However, it appears that the company isn't correcting the erratic data it gathered in the previous months. That means the April 2018 Steam Hardware and Software Survey is the only accurate measure of hardware usage by Steam members in the last seven months. It also isn't clear if the company made other changes to its survey methodology since it last posted accurate data in July 2017.