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Alternative options: - International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks. - Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't

Alternative options: - International Data Corporation is overestimating the amount of shipped Steam Decks. - Modified Steam Decks (i.e. running Bazzite) don't report themselves to be Steam Decks - Most likely: most Steam Deck users opt out of participating in the Steam Hardware survey/analytics. Last year, I didn't participate in the Steam Hardware survey on my Deck, only on my PC. This year, I participated on my Deck and my desktop, but not my laptop. I still have three devices running Steam. To any survey, it'll look like the amount of Steam devices doubled even though I'm only reporting 67% of my devices to analytics.

brianwawok 1y ago
I’m Linux gaming bazzite on my tower. Sees at least as many of us as steam decks.
dm319 1y ago
Another alternative - may depend on the period being measured. I haven't looked at the article or their methodology, but if they were measuring over a certain period of time, a few hours, or even 24 hours, it will still likely only pick up a proportion of Steam owners.
zamadatix 1y ago
Even more likely: A sizable portion of Steam Decks sold are not played every month.
Jach 1y ago
The third is close but it's even more likely that they just weren't prompted to survey at all rather than opting out. They're surveys, not automatic data harvesting, they don't represent things like Facebook's "total monthly active users". They're just a random sample of users, not a population count. Steam does sometimes report things like monthly active users in their annual reports, but haven't ever broken that down I don't think, but you can just infer it from the surveys. I also have steam on multiple devices including a steam deck. On desktop I'm pretty much always logged in and I play games frequently, but most months I'm not selected for a survey. I use my steam deck less frequently and have maybe only gotten the survey prompt on it once or twice.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  You REALLY don't need to care about querying the whole population for these kinds of statistics. Steam has a MAU of at least 132,000,000 users. To randomly sample from just 17,000 users (0.0012% of the MAU) would provide a 99% confidence the sample is within +-0.5% the actual value. Given that you've personally been selected multiple months, they are almost certainly well and above a sampling rate worth worrying about. The survey does have other statistical noises/biases/errors though - but none nearly as large as this "gap". E.g. internet cafe reuse of the same machines by different accounts means if you're hoping for a "hardware popularity survey" instead of a "hardware users use popularity survey" then the number won't always make sense.

brianwawok 1y ago

I’m Linux gaming bazzite on my tower. Sees at least as many of us as steam decks.

dm319 1y ago

Another alternative - may depend on the period being measured. I haven't looked at the article or their methodology, but if they were measuring over a certain period of time, a few hours, or even 24 hours, it will still likely only pick up a proportion of Steam owners.

zamadatix 1y ago

Even more likely: A sizable portion of Steam Decks sold are not played every month.

Jach 1y ago

The third is close but it's even more likely that they just weren't prompted to survey at all rather than opting out. They're surveys, not automatic data harvesting, they don't represent things like Facebook's "total monthly active users". They're just a random sample of users, not a population count. Steam does sometimes report things like monthly active users in their annual reports, but haven't ever broken that down I don't think, but you can just infer it from the surveys. I also have steam on multiple devices including a steam deck. On desktop I'm pretty much always logged in and I play games frequently, but most months I'm not selected for a survey. I use my steam deck less frequently and have maybe only gotten the survey prompt on it once or twice.

zamadatix 1y ago
You REALLY don't need to care about querying the whole population for these kinds of statistics. Steam has a MAU of at least 132,000,000 users. To randomly sample from just 17,000 users (0.0012% of the MAU) would provide a 99% confidence the sample is within +-0.5% the actual value. Given that you've personally been selected multiple months, they are almost certainly well and above a sampling rate worth worrying about. The survey does have other statistical noises/biases/errors though - but none nearly as large as this "gap". E.g. internet cafe reuse of the same machines by different accounts means if you're hoping for a "hardware popularity survey" instead of a "hardware users use popularity survey" then the number won't always make sense.