Valve started the Steam Hardware Survey in 1998 to find out what specs it should be targeting for Half-Life 2.

The Steam Hardware Survey is a vital resource for the games industry. It allows curious enthusiasts or developers who are interested in the hobby to gain a better understanding of what the average PC gamer likes. According to Valve senior engineer Jay Stelly, in Half-Life 2’s new 20th Anniversary developer commentary, the Steam Hardware Survey was first created because Valve had no other means of accessing information.

Stelly stated in a commentary track in the Route Kanal level that "During development we faced many decisions influenced by our minimum specification--the least-powerful CPU and GPU combination which would still deliver a great experience for customers." "In the early 2000s there was a much greater variety of GPUs than now, with vast differences in terms of speed and fundamental approaches to rendering."

It's easy to forget this when people reminisce about the old days of PC gaming. There were many exciting graphical advances, but compatibility wasn't always guaranteed. 3Dfx cards, ATI, Nvidia and Matrox cards were all available in the late ’90s and early ’00s, and they didn't play well with all games. Obsolescence also came much faster--you can get away with a GTX 970 that is 10 years old in Dragon Age: Veilguard. Imagine trying to run Half-Life 2 with hardware from 1994.

Stelly continued, "But at that time, we did not have any real data on the hardware that our customers were using." What CPUs and GPUs were they using? How much RAM do they have? Which version of Windows do you use? Microsoft was contacted to find out if they could answer questions such as 'How many DX7 graphics cards are used? Or DX8? Unfortunately, they did not have the data.

"We realized that we could make bad decisions without this information, so we developed an analysis tool to allow players to send us their hardware specs. We integrated it into the first version of Steam. We found the data so valuable that we decided to share it with the public. In April 2003, we launched the Steam Hardware Survey. Since then, it has helped us--and hopefully others developers--make informed choices.

The Steam Hardware Survey for October shows a very different industry than when the initiative was first launched. Team Red and Team Green still exist, but ATI has been acquired by AMD and Nvidia's consumer GPU business is a quaint afterthought, despite its dominance in the market. Intel and AMD are still in a dead heat for processors. However, ARM is poised to overtake x86 and boasts higher core counts, storage, memory, and clock speed. Steam is the most popular way to get PC games. Linux is also finally showing its strength as a PC gaming system, thanks in large part to Valve. There are Mac games available.