hi

I just found these statistics published by Steam, their really gamers only data, might be interesting for defining your game's system requirements:
(I really needed it because on my old pc current things usually run too slow, which is a good motivation for optimization, but as I see I could use more bravely CPU/GPU intensive graphics)

video cards:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

others:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

I find the infos about the primary screen resolution more interesting. 5 years ago it was rather bulletproof to develop a game for 4:3 displays and chose 1024x768 as main resolution.

Today, we have widescreens with different aspect ratios, lots of 4:3 monitors, too, and so much resolutions to take care off.

These "wild" resolutions make it very, very challenging to design cool menus, HUD and generell UI. If you rescale your panels and texts, how do you chose a reference resolution for your UI, if you rescale it?? In addition, it is quiet annoying, too, because if you run much postprocessing stuff, you have to keep in mind that larger screen resolutions raise the costs for memory and processing power. And if you don't constrain the supported resolutions, you simply don't know what happens on the users PC.

That is why I would love to develop something for a console, because you have one system with well defined specs.

I remember the last one I read from Steam.

1024x768 was the resolution to use. Now it's 1920x1080 (desktop) + 1366x768 (laptop resolution)

I'm not surprised that dual cores are still going high. I'm guessing the next one will have quad cores with a higher percentage when the dual corese become too slow to match up the needs of an average gamer.

People are also finally moving to Win7 - some prefer XP still, but the 3.6G limit to memory will start dragging at some point, and they will upgrade (which is already clearly visible).

Otherwise it looks nothing surprising. I hope not to see any 4:3 screens in 5 years though...