Valve's steam hardware survey

[Sillysoft]

I just saw this survey result of Valve asking about their client's hardware:

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

I'm pretty sure that these results are higher-end then the average of my customer's, but it's still interesting to look at. They had something like half a million replies, so that should give it some moxy to stand on. I was surprised that openGL beat direct3D by so much.

[Dan MacDonald]

Well that's valves market, if you want to compete with HL2 I hope you give them a run for their money! ;)

Actually it's always suprizing to look at valves market demographics, the amount of people with broadband is staggering.

[princec]

The broadband revolution has just crept up on everyone whilst they repeated Steve Pavlina's Commandments^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HMantra over and over again "thou shalt not make a game bigger than 5MB".

I wonder how many people noticed his latest releases were 10MB?

And to think I got so much stick for making my game 10MB :/ I hope everyone feels suitably sheepish.

Cas :)

[cliffski]

Im actually aiming for a 20MB game now. people expect at least 10MB for anything buyable. The problem is, people like us pay for our download bandwidth, so over 20MB is expensive.
Plus, people will spend all night downloading HL2, if your unknown indie effort isn't up and running in 10 minutes, you probably lost a sale.

[princec]

I pretty much concur with that.

I can't see myself doing games bigger than 20mb for a little while though - that's a quite a lot of content! I'm trying to move away from content and focus on core gameplay and replayability.

Cas :)

[James C. Smith]

In the US we recently crossed the half way mark and now more home Internet users have broadband than dial up. Some people are excited and saying now the world is ready for 20 MB games (or larger). I am saying what the hack are you guys thinking, 47% of Internet users have dialup and would not download that! I am not ready to ignore nearly half the potential market.

[princec]

Your games are going to be on sale for another 5 years - and in just another year or so, nearly everyone worth targeting will have broadband access...

Cas :)

[Jim Buck]

James, where did you get the statistic about crossing the 50% line? Last I read, it was 26%, but that was about 1.5 years ago..

[EpicBoy]

Yeah, 50% sounds mighty unlikely to me. Link?

[James C. Smith]

Half of U.S. Web Users Now on Broadband -- Report

Wed Aug 18, 6:07 PM ET - REUTERS

By Eric Auchard
NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than half of all U.S. residential Internet users reached the Web via fast broadband connections in July, outpacing use of slower, dial-up connections for the first time, market researcher Nielsen//NetRatings said on Wednesday.

Sixty-three million Web users connected to the Internet via home broadband links, which include high-speed connections over cable television networks or upgraded phone lines using technologies like ISDN or DSL, it said.

That amounts to 51 percent of U.S. residential users, up from 49 percent in June and from 38 percent just a year earlier. Sixty-one million, or 49 percent of residential users, us narrowband hookups, down from 62 percent last July, Nielsen//NetRatings said.

Faster access times allow users to view a range of graphically richer content, including movies and more sophisticated advertising.

Narrowband connections are defined as links with speeds between 14,400 to 56,000 bits per second, typically delivered over conventional dial-up phone lines. They were critical to the first generation of commercial Internet use a decade ago.

The milestone was crossed in terms of users, but the actual number of U.S. households with broadband Internet connections remains significantly less, according to Bruce Leichtman, the principal analyst for market research firm Leichtman Research. This reflects the difference between users and subscribers, he said.

"We shouldn't really think that half of America is subscribing to broadband yet, but we may be there in a year," he said.

The number of residential broadband connections underestimates actual broadband usage because the figures do not include office connections, which many users rely on for personal Internet surfing, Leichtman noted.

U.S. broadband usage is far behind other industrial countries in Asia and Europe. For example, broadband was relied on by 91 percent of home Internet users in Japan during June, according to Nielsen//NetRatings statistics.

Despite rapid gains in U.S. subscribers over the past year, the pace of growth has slowed recently, the analysts said.

According to Leichtman, the 20 largest U.S. broadband carriers added 1.7 million subscribers during the second quarter, the lowest total in a year. The 20 largest companies have signed up 28.6 million high-speed Internet households and account for about 95 percent of the U.S. market, he said

[Jim Buck]

Intereeeeeeeeesting. It looks like it's been exploding since early last year. Thanks for that, James.

And, according to:

http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/news.jsp

San Diego has the highest penetration - woohoo! :)

[Mike Wiering]

Wow, 100.01 % of the computers support the RDTSC instruction!

[Sunshine]

What an educational thread :cool:

[princec]

Broadband is set to overtake narrowband in the UK early next year as well.
And we're conveniently forgetting the very large number of people who use the network at work to download things...

Cas :)