Steam Hardware
A place to discuss and support all Steam Hardware, including Steam Deck, Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and SteamOS in general.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Deck] - Steam Deck related.
[Controller] - Steam Controller related.
[Machine] - Steam Machine related.
[Frame] - Steam Frame related.
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
If your post is only relevant to one hardware device (Deck/Machine/Frame/etc) please specify which one as part of the title or by using a device flair.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
- Follow the rules of Sopuli
- Posts must be related to Steam Hardware or Steam OS in an obvious way.
- No piracy, there are other communities for that.
- Discussion of emulators are allowed, but no discussion on how to illegally acquire ROMs.
- This is a place of civil discussion, no trolling.
- Have fun.
view the rest of the comments
I have a Steam Deck I would consider to be in active use, but it's a secondary system for me, and the times I'm using it most heavily are done without Internet. I don't believe it's ever been counted in a survey, and I imagine there's a bunch of users in the same situation.
The same kind of thing used to happen with VR headsets before they switched it to counting any headset used in the last 30 days (determined by whether the driver was launched). I always used to get the survey when mine wasn't plugged in, and it always annoyed me to not be counted in the VR userbase. Lol.
For the survey it does not matter how often you use it or how you use it, with or without internet. If you got the survey and accepted to send the data to Valve, then you are counted in that month. Otherwise not.
As I understand it, the survey flags a random sampling of logged in Steam user accounts to run the survey on each month. For each selected user, the survey prompt then pops up the next time they're online on the device they're online with as an offline device can't receive the survey notice.
Let's say I game with my desktop 20 times per month and my Deck 10 times per month, but I'm only actually connecting it to the Internet 2 times a month for updates. In that scenario, it seems the desktop would be 10 times more likely to get the survey even though that doesn't reflect the actual usage spread.
Edit: I should add that this is a slightly different issue than what your original question is getting at. You want the raw active user count, in which case I should be 100% reported in both the desktop and the Deck counts at the same time. As far as I know, Steam does not do that.
Oh I see what you mean. You are absolutely right. Using the device less often or mostly in offline mode will drastically reduce the chance of getting the survey.
Yeah, the inverse problem also exists, multiple users on a single device causing that device to get over-reported. This is most commonly seen with cyber cafes in Asia. The effect is present all year (and is another reason to expect the actual Deck percentage to be slightly higher), but it spikes every February as Chinese cyber cafes get busy over Lunar New Year.