AMD: Steam Hardware Survey not an accurate measure of marketshare

Speaking to HotHardware, AMD Radeon VP & General Manager Scott Herkelman revealed that the Steam Hardware Survey is not accurate as it undercounts AMD-based systems. The Steam Hardware Survey is the largest publicly available set of data about what sort of hardware the typical gamer uses, but it's been odd that there has been no increase in AMD's marketshare since the launch of the first-generation Ryzen.

Herkelman says the Steam Hardware Survey isn't intended to track real-life marketshare, but to tell developers what kind of products are in-market. The reason why AMD's marketshare isn't accurate is because internet cafes complicate the matter, as there's a lot of double counting going on that isn't properly addressed by Valve:

Steam’s survey, according to Herkelman, isn’t meant to measure hardware market share for companies. It’s supposed to tell developers what kind of products are in-market. The reason the Steam hardware survey went nuts back in 2017 is that Steam was over-counting every single individual login at an iCafe as another instance of that computer’s system configuration. Imagine if you had 10 of your best friends over to play Steam games on your PC. Every single one of them logged in to their own accounts — which led to 10 copies of your system config being uploaded to the platform and counted as separate submissions.

That’s basically what happened with Steam. And according to AMD, while the company made some corrections to its data, Valve has never been particularly concerned with making sure its numbers track real-life market share. AMD, meanwhile, is drastically underrepresented in iCafe gaming.

More details can be read at ExtremeTech. As the site suggests, this means GPU figures from the Steam Hardware Survey are also inaccurate.