Asking Valve for Steam Survey Results

[Scott Ritchie]

Valve regularly runs surveys of steam users, where they profile many
different things about the hardware.  They're nice enough to publish the
results:

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

Some of these provide a way to detect Wine users.  Everyone using the
"Wine waveout" audio driver, for instance, must be a Wine user.
Unfortunately, valve lumps all of these into "other" on the survey
results page.

Worries about sampling bias aside (maybe Wine users are less likely to
do the steam survey), if we had the raw data from Valve we could
determine the actual percentage of Steam users playing through Wine.

Looking at the data we do have, we may be able to make a good guess from
examining the video card driver name field.  Excluding NVidia, ATI, and
Intel leaves just over 4% of respondents using an "other" video driver
like the Wine one.  If even only a quarter of these "others" are using
Wine, that still gives us 1% of the entire 10 million+ Steam user base,
translating into hundreds of thousands of users.

Does anyone know whom we can contact at Valve for more specific results?

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

[Stefan Dösinger]

Am Mittwoch, 14. November 2007 00:45:29 schrieb Scott Ritchie:
> Looking at the data we do have, we may be able to make a good guess from
> examining the video card driver name field.  Excluding NVidia, ATI, and
> Intel leaves just over 4% of respondents using an "other" video driver
> like the Wine one.  If even only a quarter of these "others" are using
> Wine, that still gives us 1% of the entire 10 million+ Steam user base,
> translating into hundreds of thousands of users.
> It depends on how they find the vendor. If they go for the d3d string, then 
> wine shows up as "Direct3D HAL", which would be identifyable. If they go for 
> the PCI ID, then Wine installations show up as either ATI, NVIDIA, or Intel, 
> unless the detection failed.

More interesting is the "Video Card Driver Name":
Video Card Driver Name
 
nv4_disp.dll  10,269  
53.43 %#####################################################
  ati2dvag.dll  5,060  26.33 %##########################
  nvd3dum.dll  2,698  14.04 %##############
  atiumdag.dll  571  2.97 %###
  ialmrnt5.dll  302  1.57 %##
  Other  319  1.66 %##

This identifies the DLL, and wine has none of them. So we'd show up in the 
Other section here. Possible others in Windows space are matrox, sis and 
other chips, as well as the generic vesa driver.

The best identification is the sound card name, or if Wine's display driver 
shows up as winex11.drv

[Brian Vincent]

On Nov 13, 2007 4:45 PM, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> Does anyone know whom we can contact at Valve for more specific results?

Here's the answer from Valve to your question:

----

Hey Brian, we would be more than happy to help. I just did a quick query
for the audio device and found 12 out of 8566 results to contain "wine"
in the name of the driver. I did the same for video card and found zero,
if you can give me more details on specific strings or signatures for a
wine user I could have a look for. We just started this survey today so
I can run the queries again once we have a larger sample set.

Our crash reporting system also collects information about the existence
of wine, about 0.4% of the reports are from Wine users (this is for a
couple months of data so a statistically significant sample). We have
around 3 million unique users in a month so that is around 12k wine
users. Given the large majority of crashes are game code related (and
not OS dependant) I suspect this is a fair measure for you.

----

-Brian

[Scott Ritchie]

Brian Vincent wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2007 4:45 PM, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> > Does anyone know whom we can contact at Valve for more specific results?
>
> Here's the answer from Valve to your question:
>
> ----
>
> Hey Brian, we would be more than happy to help. I just did a quick query
> for the audio device and found 12 out of 8566 results to contain "wine"
> in the name of the driver. I did the same for video card and found zero,
> if you can give me more details on specific strings or signatures for a
> wine user I could have a look for. We just started this survey today so
> I can run the queries again once we have a larger sample set.
>
> Our crash reporting system also collects information about the existence
> of wine, about 0.4% of the reports are from Wine users (this is for a
> couple months of data so a statistically significant sample). We have
> around 3 million unique users in a month so that is around 12k wine
> users. Given the large majority of crashes are game code related (and
> not OS dependant) I suspect this is a fair measure for you.
>
> ----
>
> -Brian

How are these crash reports generated?  I've never seen a method for
reporting a crash to steam when using it with Wine.

Thank you for taking the initiative on this Brian, and double thanks to
Valve :)

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

[Bryan Haskins]

That is pretty fricking cool. It's not an astronomical figure and
realistically could be contended from many directions but still some idea of
the userbase, I call that significant. =]

On Nov 14, 2007 11:52 AM, Brian Vincent <brian.vincent(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2007 4:45 PM, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> > Does anyone know whom we can contact at Valve for more specific results?
>
> Here's the answer from Valve to your question:
>
> ----
>
> Hey Brian, we would be more than happy to help. I just did a quick query
> for the audio device and found 12 out of 8566 results to contain "wine"
> in the name of the driver. I did the same for video card and found zero,
> if you can give me more details on specific strings or signatures for a
> wine user I could have a look for. We just started this survey today so
> I can run the queries again once we have a larger sample set.
>
> Our crash reporting system also collects information about the existence
> of wine, about 0.4% of the reports are from Wine users (this is for a
> couple months of data so a statistically significant sample). We have
> around 3 million unique users in a month so that is around 12k wine
> users. Given the large majority of crashes are game code related (and
> not OS dependant) I suspect this is a fair measure for you.
>
> ----
>
> -Brian

-- 
Cheers,
Bryan

[Scott Ritchie]

Brian Vincent wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2007 4:45 PM, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> > Does anyone know whom we can contact at Valve for more specific results?
>
> Here's the answer from Valve to your question:
>
> ----
>
> Hey Brian, we would be more than happy to help. I just did a quick query
> for the audio device and found 12 out of 8566 results to contain "wine"
> in the name of the driver. I did the same for video card and found zero,
> if you can give me more details on specific strings or signatures for a
> wine user I could have a look for. We just started this survey today so
> I can run the queries again once we have a larger sample set.
>
> Our crash reporting system also collects information about the existence
> of wine, about 0.4% of the reports are from Wine users (this is for a
> couple months of data so a statistically significant sample). We have
> around 3 million unique users in a month so that is around 12k wine
> users. Given the large majority of crashes are game code related (and
> not OS dependant) I suspect this is a fair measure for you.
>
> ----

Thank you so much Brian.  Could we get an update with more recent stats
from the survey?  It's had a few weeks to run now.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

[Alfred Reynolds]

The numbers are now 0.13% of total reports coming from Wine users.

- Alfred
> -----Original Message-----
> From: wine-devel-bounces(a)winehq.org [mailto:wine-devel-
> bounces(a)winehq.org] On Behalf Of Scott Ritchie
> Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007 3:41 AM
> To: Brian Vincent
> Cc: Wine Devel
> Subject: Re: Asking Valve for Steam Survey Results
>
> Brian Vincent wrote:
> > On Nov 13, 2007 4:45 PM, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> > > Does anyone know whom we can contact at Valve for more specific
> > > results?
> >
> > Here's the answer from Valve to your question:
> >
> > ----
> >
> > Hey Brian, we would be more than happy to help. I just did a quick
> > query
> > for the audio device and found 12 out of 8566 results to contain
> > "wine"
> > in the name of the driver. I did the same for video card and found
> > zero,
> > if you can give me more details on specific strings or signatures
> > for
> > a
> > wine user I could have a look for. We just started this survey today
> > so
> > I can run the queries again once we have a larger sample set.
> >
> > Our crash reporting system also collects information about the
> > existence
> > of wine, about 0.4% of the reports are from Wine users (this is for
> > a
> > couple months of data so a statistically significant sample). We
> > have
> > around 3 million unique users in a month so that is around 12k wine
> > users. Given the large majority of crashes are game code related
> > (and
> > not OS dependant) I suspect this is a fair measure for you.
> >
> > ----
>
> Thank you so much Brian.  Could we get an update with more recent
> stats
> from the survey?  It's had a few weeks to run now.
>
> Thanks,
> Scott Ritchie