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Steam Update Shows FPS Gamer Stats
majestik writes "Valve Software today sent out a Half-Life 2 hardware survey via their Steam content delivery app to over 270,000 gamers (and counting!), collecting various hardware and software information about their PC systems to see how they'll measure up to the forthcoming FPS. Lotsa interesting data to check out, if you ever wanted to know what kind of systems today's FPS gamers use. And yes, if you're wondering, right now Intel takes 50.02% of the CPU market, leaving AMD with 49.98%." The stats are updated in real-time, and it seems this update has again stressed the Steam servers, with a message noting "the Steam network has been overloaded, causing many Steam users to be unable to login", though the effect is reportedly diminishing.
Forget Intel and AMD.
I am curious to see who really has the bigger market share between ATI and Nvidia. They have way more influence on game libraries and graphics call than both processor company IMHO.
They plan to release it in four ways:
1. Basic Retail Pack. Only Single Player with an option to upgrade to Multiplayer for a price over the internet.
2. Full Retail Pack. Single Player and Multiplayer in one pack.
3. Gold Retail Pack. Single Player, Multiplayer and all types of extra junk all crammed into it.
4. Steam. Which will be Multiplayer, Singleplayer and maybe include a few mods that teams are working on right now(valvE are supporting HL1 mod teams in this).
Valve want people to buy it over Steam for one good reason: Cash.
They get 100% of all revenue from Steam based purchases, effectivly cutting retailers, middlemen and their publisher(Vivendi Universal Games) out of the loop.
Which means that they get an arseload of money.
Read Errant Story.
The survey is quite interesting, as are the stats as to how many servers and players are online etc. Average player minutes last month: 1.160 billion! I'm guessing that's a US billion, which is 1000 x 1million; a UK and German billion (probably other places too) is 1million x 1million. Anyway, I was surprised at the AMD/Intel CPU distribution (about half each).
However, for all their ease of updates and cutting out middlemen for software retail etc, it sucks. As soon as an update like this comes out, everybody's steam client wants to update, the servers get overloaded and become effectively unavailable - I can't play online without updating, and I can't even play any of the steam games offline (offline play is part of this update). Must be hell for those with slower links.
If it worth joining a system, where you can't use it for 3 days when a large update comes out? I think the basic idea is good, but the implementation sucks raw eggs! They don't even use the browser settings and go through a proxy - that would save a lot of bandwidth, and reduce their system load. You could go further with something like BitTorrent, even.
-- Steve
I'm surprised to see approximately 41% of those surveyed have Hyperthreading enabled. From what I know there are not very many processors that support this feature. Also considering that Intel has about 50% of those surveyed this means there are only 9% of Intel CPUS survey without HT? A little unbelievable...
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