Valve’s monthly hardware and software survey, which has been publicly conducted since 2003, was launched to help the company collect player data before the release of Half-Life 2. This was a href=”https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/valve-first-came-up-with-the-steam-hardware-survey-more-than-20-years-ago-because-it-wanted-to-know-what-specs-it-should-target-for-half-life-2/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>reported by PC Gamer.

Valve gathered Half-Life 2 developers together in honor of the game’s 20th anniversary. During this event, the company’s senior engineer Jay Stelly said that Valve simply had no other way to obtain information about the technical characteristics of players. The company even contacted Microsoft, but the Windows developer did not have such data either.

“During development, we faced numerous decisions influenced by our choice of minimum spec⁠—the least powerful CPU and GPU combination that would still deliver a good experience for customers. In the early 2000s, there was far more variety among GPUs than today, with wide differences not only in speed but in fundamental approaches to rendering,” Stelly said.

To get a better idea of what hardware Steam users were using, the company conducted its first hardware and software survey. Later, in April 2003, the company decided to make this data public to help other studios. Since then, the Steam survey has provided detailed information on player characteristics, from processor and RAM to operating system version and monitor resolution.

As of October 2024, the most popular operating system among Steam users was Windows 11, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 continues to hold the lead among video cards, which is already actively breathing down the neck of the RTX 4060. Also, most players have 16 or 32 GB of RAM and a monitor with a resolution of 1980 × 1080 pixels.