Comparing the number of Steam accounts to WoW accounts is comparing apples to oranges. (And also makes an implicit assumption that everyone who has a Steam account has a gaming PC, which is not a good assumption.)

In 2004, Steam had no noteworthy buzz and its only purpose was Half-Life 2 DRM.

Steam survey actually provides good hardware numbers.

The important thing is with the number of Steam Users each 1% is more than 1 million people. Thus < 50% can still be a lot of people. (4.39% own a 970 GTX GPU, 0.92% own a 980 GTX GPU, 0.72% own a GTX 980 Ti ~= 7.5 million people who don't need to upgrade graphics card, now add ATI and SLI.)

PS: Active Steam account = bought something from steam AND logged on in the last 2 weeks. Which IMO is a much higher hurdle than most website tracking. And clearly not all gaming PC's are on Steam.

Steam often logs in on boot. I don't see this as a very interesting metric and certainly not related to the popularity of the first generation of a VR device.

How else are you going to estimate the number of PC's used for games that don't need to upgrade? Or even the number of PC gamers?

My 4-year-old GTX660 is a mid-range card even today. Give it five or six years.

A GTX 660 is a low end card. A GTX 950 is 150$ and ~5-10% faster than a GTX 660.

It is an old card that was fairly high-end when it came out. It matches the graphical capabilities of the PS4 today.

It's not low end, it's mid-range. HD at 60fps (often higher) on med-high settings on everything but the very most recent games (without MSAA).

Again, you'll probably need to wait more than 4 years for a high-end card to become "very low end". I'd give it five or six years.

IMO, sub 150 = low end, 150-320 = mid range, 320+ = high end. The 660 GTX is worse than a 150$ graphics card (GTX 950).

Granted, in terms of hardware people are currently using the GTX 660 might still be mid range.

Right. I was basing my comparison on performance rather than price. But in terms of price, you're absolutely correct, the GTX 660 isn't worth much.