What hardware average games players have

Very interesting reading (for nerds):

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

This is actually pretty interesting and useful for a game developer, especially which displays and gpu's to target, amounts of system/graphics ram etc, gpu capabilities and so on. Good stuff. Thanks.

heh I'm pretty much mr average across the board if you ignore me only having 128mb vram

I seem to be the higher end of the scale, 4200+ dual core AMD, 7600GT 256mb gfx. But then there's still quite a few games I can't run too well. i.e spiderman3

Average Steam-enabled games players, more like? Because the average casual gamer surely isn't downloading her games via Valve's service.

My thoughts exactly.

What I found interesting, is this one:

AuthenticAMD 188,531 48.54 %
GenuineIntel 199,821 51.45 %

Now keep in mind that Intel still has a 76% market share, which means that AMD's are over-represented in this survey. Before the core 2 Duo's came out, 'power gamers' were more likely to use high-end AMD chips. I wonder how much that is skewing the results?

I would expect the 'casual game' market to follow the actual CPU marketshare's a lot closer than this survey did... So I doubt how relevant this survey really is to the casual market (as opposed to the 'people who actually ordered stuff from Steam'-group)


another interesting one:

4:3 aspect ratio monitor: 86.20%
16:9 aspect ratio monitor: 13.25%

So obviously 4:3 is still king, but there's a significant number of widescreens out there.

and this one:

Monitor refresh rate 60Hz: 63.98 %

That's a good one to know. But one can only hope that a good percentage of that is made up of LCD's, rather than people staring at a flickering screen all day. :-?

And this one:

only between 1.89% and 2.93% of users has a desktop resolution below 1024x768.

Interesting. Now I'd like to see the same stats for the casual game market. Bet Real Arcade could collect some awesome stats.

And 5:4 ? Quite common as well, all those non-wide 17"/19" TFT screens run 1280x1024

hang on, no. Steam now has a lot of casual games on it's service, i.e. Zuma. So this isn't just hardcore 3D gamers we're looking at.

OK then we need to know the split of Casual vs hardcore game downloads.

According to web stats about 50-60% of people have 1024x768 or higher desktops, which 40% is clearly a big difference from the 3% of users mentioned above.

I'm pretty average now, havn't upgraded for over a year.

It pretty much must be -- I can't see a significant number of people signing up for Steam specifically to buy casual games. Most folk sign up because they're hardcore gamers and the latest shiny nonsense that they want forces them to use the service, surely?

Now it might be that Steam users have an amount of interest in the casual fare that the service also serves up (in fact its very presence on there strongly infers that they do) -- great, but that tells us next to nothing about the wider casual market and what hardware the average gamer has.

yeah I haven't upgraded in 3 years! and my PC still rocks.

I upgraded not that long ago but did not buy the top of the range. I tend to stay in the middle of the power field. I dont have the money to buy a top of the range setup but I can afford a 6 month of setup which is just as good.

currently sitting with.

Athlon 64 Dual core
1 GIG Ram
GF 7600 GS with Zelman.