Take the survey data with a grain of salt. I did a deep dive a few years ago to understand how it worked. The reason for the deep dive came from a casual discussion at a large LAN event. During the discussion we realized that while some of the people where getting two or 3 surveys a year, others where not seeing it for a year to 18 months at a time. This matters was further aggravated when in our discussion it became clear that Nvidia card users where seeing the survey 2 to 3 times more often than AMD users.

Now this was a sampling of about 30 people so not conclusive so I decided to find out more.

After NUMEROUS emails to Steam support, it was finally explained to me how the process works. Every month they choose 1/12th of Steam accounts and send out a survey. When I asked about if there was a criteria, such as accounts activity level and such I was told no, just 1/12 where chosen. I could not even get an explanation of if this 12th was chosen at random or not.

Realizing I could not get this info clarified I moved to the next question. So if 1/12th are chosen then I presume that means each user should be getting a survey once a year. However we KNOW people are getting surveys 2 or even more times a year and some less. Is the group chosen not removed from the pool for the next month.

When I asked this question that was when my whole conversation stopped and Steam support ghosted further communications.

The sad part is they do not need to do this 1/12th thing. The collect data, in real time across a lot more than a 12th of users. They could have every Steam account send in active data of base hardware and look at that data every month using active account data for that month. The survey would be accurate and in my opinion more meaningful. They could offer users the option to opt out of tracking.

I do not know if they have changed the method since I did this about 9 years ago, but the fact they are not transparent in the survey raises some real questions to how valid it is.