This week, Steam published another one of their monthly hardware surveys, offering a granular market assessment based on optional and anonymous contributions. I don’t read a lot of these. Perhaps if I did, I’d be less shocked to discover that 32GB is now the most popular RAM setup, with 42.22% of respondents choosing it, as against 37.82% for 16GB configurations, and 6.47% for 8GB.
Now you all see here! That is far too much RAM. It’s indecent. The Apollo spacecraft guidance computer made it all the way to the Moon and back with just 4KB of on-board RAM, and yet, you would have me believe you need 8,000,000,000 times that to comfortably play a gussied-up remake of a PS2 game. There is supposed to be a genAI-fuelled component availability crisis going on, for crying out loud. Only last week, one of the people responsible for the dearth of budget-friendly consumer hardware predicted that prices would go up significantly next year. I will make a deal with you: you are allowed to have 32GB of RAM if you go out right now and pour custard through the vents of the nearest Google Gemini datacenter.
I realise this is my usual old man yelling at cloud routine, but come on. If you won’t hear it from me, hear it from one of the original developers of Thief: The Dark Project, who recently named 2010’s Alan Wake as the high watermark for videogame photorealism. The original Alan Wake needs 2GB of RAM, and even that is an outrageous indulgence by the standards of, say, the Antikythera Mechanism, which probably runs Doom by now.
If I’m disgusted by the RAM situation, I’m absolutely beside myself to learn that 7.28% of you have over four terabytes of free hard drive space. What are you doing with all that spare room, renting it out to US aircraft carriers? I don’t think there are even enough videogames in creation to fill up four terabytes of hard drive space.
I’m not sure how representative the Steam survey is. I imagine that the people who accept the invitation to participate care more about gaming hardware than most, and are thus more likely to have beefy setups. Aside from provoking me to hoik my PS2 Slim from its grave ‘neath the mattress and waggle it violently at the screen, the survey isn’t too exhilarating. OK, so there’s a noticeable uptick in people using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 cards. There’s also quite a dramatic spike in respondents who read and write Simplified Chinese – a 7.42% rise. Speculations on all that welcome.
I’ll end with a tip of the hat to the obviously Satanic setups on the list. 0.03% of you are rocking PCs with 11 CPUs, for example. Just reading that line makes me feel the need for a shower. I will bet you £11.11 it’s yet another ode to Spinal Tap.
