PaulAlcorn :
Assuming Steam's data in July 2017 was accurate, this chart outlines the changes over the previous seven months:
Given the success of Ryzen, the 3.46% reduction in systems with AMD processors seems questionable. Steam doesn't share much public information about its survey methodologies, such as how many systems it queries per year or the percentage of laptops and desktop PCs, so we can’t use these numbers as a direct comparison of AMD's penetration into gaming rigs.
While they might have potentially addressed the issue of systems in Chinese net cafes getting counted more times than intended, the overall demographic of users running Steam has still changed. There is still a notable increase in the number of users running Steam in that country compared to before.
According to the current survey, 30.35% of systems participating in the survey have their language set to Simplified Chinese. That's half the percentage reported a couple months back, but still nearly double what it was in the July 2017 survey, when it was at 16.64%. Likewise, the percentage of systems running Windows 7 64 bit is still getting reported as being higher than it was in July of last year. The results might not be getting thrown off quite as much by net cafes, but they are still affected by a change in demographic.
This should highlight the fact that these Steam surveys should not be taken as a precise measurement of hardware trends, since the pool of systems taking part in the survey can change from one month to the next. In this case, Steam's growth expanded in China, and since net cafes are a popular way to play games there, the results came to reflect the hardware being run in Chinese net cafes more than anything. These kinds of variances will continue to occur as Steam gains popularity in various countries, and since hardware can vary by country, that can potentially skew the numbers. Many of the results can still be considered useful for various purposes, but there are too many variables getting shifted around in the background to treat them as anything more than rough estimates covering an ever-changing international user-base. Perhaps if Steam provided additional filtering options, such as limiting results to various countries, the results might more accurately depict trends within those regions, but they have not provided that option as of yet.