AMD regains lost market share in latest figures from Steam

Steam Hardware Survey is Valve’s name for the statistics about users’ hardware that the company collects through the Steam client for Windows, Linux and Mac. Every month, a report is published that shows, for example, how many users had a certain graphics card and what percentage have Intel or AMD processors.

Now November’s report has been published, and several trends from recent months have reversed. AMD’s share of both graphics cards and processors has increased. On the Processor side, the share fell in October to 26 percent but has now increased to 35 percent, more than in September. For graphics cards, the results were closer to how it looked in September and before that, so if there are similar numbers in December as well, it will be October’s statistics that stand out.

Tom’s Hardware writes that it may be connected to an old problem that Valve has known for a long time: That computers used in Internet cafes in Asia, in particular, are included in the statistics repeatedly when different players log out and log in to Steam. For example, the percentage of Steam users who have Steam in Chinese rose from 32 percent in September to 46 percent in October but now fell back to 26 percent in November. At the same time, the percentage of computers with Windows 10 increased from 56 to 66 percent and then fell to 54 percent.

The month-to-month figures can change greatly and this shows that Valve’s method can be unreliable, writes Tom’s Hardware.