Valve’s latestSteamHardware Survey for March 2023 has come back with a slew of valuable information about the platform’s audiences. This time, however, it also features a bizarre statistic that claims the number of Simplified Chinese language users dwarfs all the other disparate languages even when they’re put together.
Once a month, Valve sends out a special opt-inSteamquery to a randomized group of platform users from across the globe. Users that agree to the terms outlined by the pop-up provide Valve with a set of anonymized information that helps the company produce monthly reports on what its user base looks like from a broad, generalized perspective.
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In most instances, these hardware surveys provide a fairly reasonable overview of the average real-world gamer. For example, late in 2022, a Steam Hardware Survey revealed that theGTX 1650 was the most popular GPUamong PC gamers. The latest hardware survey conducted for March 2023, on the other hand, plainly states that the grand total of 52.70% of all Steam PC gamers uses Simplified Chinese as their language of choice, up by 25%, with English holding the second place with a comparatively meager 21.65% of total users relying on it.
While this information certainly does sound strange at face value, Valve doesn’t provide insight into the previous hardware survey results, making it impossible to quickly compare their results. It is, however, worth pointing out that Tom’s Hardware reported in 2018 that Valve was having serious problems with the manner in which surveys tracked data, making them a less-than-foolproof source of information. Something similar may be happening again, though the survey is usually reasonably reliable, as was the case with2021’s spike in Steam Linux users.
Unless Valve has instituted some major changes in how its Hardware Survey data is accounted for, the provided information is at odds with what had been previously reported. Of course, there’s currently no way of knowing what, exactly, had gone down in the backend, asValve is notoriously mysterious in some respects. It is possible that a more detailed statement may be coming down the line.
Over the years, Steam has become a PC gaming mainstay for a substantially large number of gamers. Considering its longevity, it’s easy to forgetthe many changes Steam has gone throughin the course of the past two decades, and a shift in data summary algorithms is hardly the biggest change Valve could implement so late in the service’s lifetime. Whether that’s what’s happening or if something else might be afoot, however, there’s no way to currently tell.
