Once more the Steam Winter Sale has come to an end. It will been a good 15 minutes in the rear view mirror when this post goes live.
Once more into the retail breach
And once more we have arrived an Steam’s annual summary of things. There were, of course, the winners of the Steam Awards to be announced.
Some of the 2022 Steam Awards winners
Those are not all of the winners for 2022, but Steam has a whole page if you want to see the exhaustive list and other details.
Probably the biggest surprise to me for the awards was that I actually played two of the games listed, Raft and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. I also have Stray on my wishlist. Generally there is very little overlap between what I play and what is popular.
There was also the Best of Steam for 2022, which covers the highest revenue earners, the titles with the most hours played, and all of that sort of thing, with breakout categories for VR and the Steam Deck to make sure those got some attention.
Something I played made it into the Platinum range for a couple of categories, Lost Ark.
You can view all of that at the link above, but make sure you read the notes to know what the categories mean.
Somewhat more interesting to me this year was the Steam Hardware Survey for December 2022. They ask to get the hardware stats for your machine and you get to see the totals they come up with.
Some of the main graphs from the hardware survey
You can dig deeper into the graphs to see more info, which I went and did this year.
For example, what operating systems did Steam players use? Hint: It comes from Redmond, Washington.
Steam Users Operating Systems
Yes, 96.11% of Steam users surveyed were Windows users, with Windows 10 making up the vast majority of that group. Windows 11 isn’t a horrible showing, but it is another Microsoft OS that was launched without any compelling reason to adopt it beyond being forced to because it came with your machine.
Mac OSX was the distant second with 2.45% of the population, followed by Linux, which rings in with 1.44%. That Linux number is all the more disappointing when you consider that the Steam Deck runs on it. Oh well.
I thought the screen resolution results were worth a look as well.
Steam Users Screen Resolutions
It looks like 1920×1080, or the now pretty old HDTV standard, is the default for most people, landing with 65.06% of those surveyed. Because it is the HDTV standard those screens are pretty cheap, so I can see why they remain popular.
In second place was 2560×1440 with 11.34%, which I guess was a bit of a surprise. I mean, at least it wasn’t 1024×768. Third place was 1366×768 coming in at 5.7%, which I am going to guess is a common laptop screen size.
Only 1.46% of Steam users have my own monitor’s native resolution of 3440×1440.
And then there was the GPU scan. That list went so long I had to trim it down. There is, apparently, no single consensus on video cards.
Steam Users GPUs
I cut the list off to get in at least one AMD and one Intel GPU on the list. My own video card, the now more than six year old GTX 1060 I installed when I built my current machine, actually came in second place with 5.58% of the surveyed system reporting with it. But, as long as the list was, they still had to truncate it and “other” came in at 10%.
I think, like a lot of people, I’ve stuck with the 1060 because GPUs became heinously expensive thanks to crypto mining. Crypto: destroying the environment AND keeping me from having better FPS.
Anyway, the hardware survey is kind of interesting to peruse.
Finally, the usual question for any Steam Winter Sale: Did I buy anything?
Yes I did. I plunked down last night and bought Dwarf Fortress.
Dwarf Fortress on Steam
It wasn’t even on sale, but I have some cash in my PayPal account and figured I could find some time this year to give it a try. A game of legendary depth and complexity, we’ll see how I fare when I get around to it.
So it goes. The sale is over, though something will be on sale again right away for sure, and we’re here in the new year. Welcome to 2023.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 