LogFAQs > #979011717

SinisterSlay posted...

Although technically with the overlay they do know your resolution and framerate, so they could take a guess.

True, but that's still data they'd have to collect and turn into a summary, which is work that's largely redundant when other services offer similar answers.

Bear in mind also that the primary use of such a feature would be to identify games you shouldn't buy. There'd be a handful of sales that would be made to people with crappy computers who didn't think they could run something and realized they could after Steam told them, but those would mostly be cheaper games anyway. On the flip side, I expect there have been many sales where the buyer wouldn't have bought the game if they knew how poorly it was going to run, but because it was kind of borderline put up with it instead of refunding it, and even more where the game turned out not to run but the buyer didn't figure that out until after the refund period had passed.

Basically, it would cost Valve money to implement it and would likely only reduce their total revenue instead of giving them any sort of return on that investment. It'd be convenient for users, certainly (I quite agree that it'd be really nice to see a "users with similar hardware to yours have averaged X FPS at 720p, Y FPS at 1080p, and Z FPS at 4k" section on each store page, and the technology is absolutely there to do that), but I understand why they haven't.

That is, however, something one of Steam's prospective competitors might want to look at, since that would be an actual service advantage that might justify jumping ship.