Before you start making plans to evict your current rig, I want to explain how the Steam Hardware Survey actually works. Rather than representing every player that uses the storefront, the monthly census instead uses a small percentage of participants who’ve opted in as a sample. It’s anything but representative of all 154 million active users, meaning the statistic above isn’t an absolute.
Does the author know how *survey sample sizes work?
Do I?
Is it because it’s opt in or opt out?
Technically all surveys are opt-in. Gallup can’t force you to answer questions when they call you on the phone. You could just hang up. It’s rather silly to argue that opting in makes it an invalid survey.
Why are they spying on my gear? Fuck off.
Do you have a habit of reading things on Steam?
Hardware survey is opt in, so you should chill out.
One could argue that the Steam Hardware Survey being opt-in means that it’s likely to overestimate the power of Steam users’ computers, since people with fancy rigs are far more likely to want to brag about it.
Perhaps, but a couple years ago when I still had a GTX 1050 I was happy to participate in the survey to show that a lot of gamers didn’t have fancy RTX cards. I suspect there is a lot more low-end hardware on the survey than high-end.
My 960 using ass participated just a few months ago.
The weird part is I think a lot of the disappointment comes from a lot of people with even high-end gaming systems wanted this to be the thing that replaces it just because they hate windows so much and because it wasn’t as powerful they couldn’t just buy this box and it would just do it
If they have a high end rig, they should be able to install the Steam Machine OS to it though, thus making it a high end Steam Machine?
The steam machine is also guaranteed to have official driver support for everything on the board which is definitely not the case if you install steamos on any given gaming pc
Yep but the common person doesnt want to install anything they juat want to buy sonething and plug it in. Thats why desktop linux wont happen untill they can go into a store and buy it on hardware and stream machine is the closest we have in this day and age for that to happen.
But the common person also does not have a top of the line rig because they would have had to build that. So for the common person this would be perfect.
So, I don’t know what information this is based on, but I’m questioning it.
High end gaming rigs come in pre built, for people who want that kind of warranty, or, more often in my experience, the people who own them build them. Which means they’re not super fussed about installing a different OS.
It’s more likely that some subset of them play games that require windows (VR, some racing sims, competitive online games that require kernel level anti-cheat etc), and won’t switch because of that.
There may be some subset of the gaming populace who wants that without the fuss, and usually they buy consoles. Computer gaming is what it is because people very often like control.
I’m a tinkerer at heart, and one of my older brothers used to build custom gaming rigs as part of his business back in the early 2000’s. Most of my family and quite a few of my friends have been computer gamers for decades.
I’d be willing to wager that a fair number of computer gamers aren’t bothered about the installation process of steam OS, but might be wary of limiting the games they can play using it.
This is very close I think to critics and movies. Critics will always be hyper critical of movies because, well, it’s your job. You go in and watch movies all day - you’re going to pick up on small details that most average watchers won’t notice and you will be hyper critical of that.
Similar here, if your job is to play games and review hardware I’m guessing the writer of this thinks more people than not have huge gaming setups, when in reality Valve is right, most have a modest setup. They know they’re not competing with ultra highend, those people are already in the bag. They’re going after the casual people who maybe haven’t updated their PC in 6 years and just want to play some newer games, getting them into the ecosystem. In short, it’s hard to be a critic of a system that wasn’t designed for you in mind. Hell it’s not designed for me either.
Its probably not designed for me in mind but I love my steam deck and depending on price I will probably buy a steam machine.
Edit: my personal reason is I want something to hook to my TV other than my deck I can play with my family on.
I use Bazzite on my TV, fork of SteamOS, and it’s been a gamechanger. It’s so easy to just have all of my games on the TV, so I think the machine will be a great investment.
Please tell me why you think Bazzite is a fork of SteamOS. They have completely different foundations: SteamOS is based on Arch while Bazzite is a variant of Fedora Atomic Desktop.
Am I missing something?
Fine it’s not technically a fork. It just consumes code from SteamOS and puts it onto Fedora. Happy? That wasn’t really the point of my comment, my comment was encouraging the person to try it.
That’s just not how statistics work. You never get 100% of the subjects to participate. But you get (in Steam’s case) an enormous sample size, that very likely represents the vast majority of gamers.
The design looks so solid but it’s likely not more powerful than an RX 6750XT or RTX3080 so it’s not something I’ll need sadly.
It’s roughly two-thirds of a 6750xt or half of a 3080 so yeah definitely not
