Steam Hardware & Software Survey...

I want to share a nice little piece of information that i think every web designer should keep in mind. It has to do with system requirements. I know when i create my websites i have to keep in mind the types of people who would be visiting and what type of equipment they are running. So here is a survey collected by Valve with the digital content platform Steam.

Steam's Hardware & Software Survery January 2011

Currently Steam has a total of 1,837,066 users that peaked at 3,488,537 users today. While the actual numbers of participants of the survey are unknown to me right now, i find this survey very useful into gaining a general insight to what kind of configurations people are running.

Notable statistics that we should consider is...

Primary display resolution

1680 x 1050 = 17.90% -0.44%
1920 x 1080 = 17.61% +1.28%
1280 x 1024 = 14.00% -0.60%

That right there tells us that at least 49.51% of users have a wide screen monitor that could display HD resolutions above 720p. On top of that it also shows the slight changed in the HD resolutions.

Connection speeds

2,048.0 Kbps = 37.87% +0.65%
10,000.0 Kbps = 16.29% +0.32%
768.0 Kbps = 10.53% +0.24%


64.69% of users have very fast broadband internet connections but, again, i have to stress that this is a survey taken from users of a digital delivery platform that more or less requires a broadband connection.

Web browser

Mozilla Firefox = 62.05%
Microsoft Internet Explorer = 19.82%
Google Chrome = 11.56%
Safari = 8.69%


Thats a very useful stat to know because not all browser are the same.

And now the last stat which is probably the most relevant to our class...

Software

Adobe Flash Player = 96.79%
Microsoft Silverlight = 56.13%
Adobe AIR = 40.60%


Just a quick breakdown of what kind of content people can receive from the web. I bet most of those people have Silverlight installed just so they can watch Netflix.

So that was a brief looking into Steam's Hardware & Software Survey : January 2011. Its a great look into what most modern computer are running. I hope the people who see this find it very informational. See you all in class!