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I think it’s safe to say that Steam stats undercount the potential size of the Mac gaming market. There are a few reasons for this: - The trailing effect of Ap
by TheTon 4y ago
I think it’s safe to say that Steam stats undercount the potential size of the Mac gaming market. There are a few reasons for this:
- The trailing effect of Apple’s underpowered Intel Macs. For many years the average Mac was an Intel MacBook Air, which never had a hope of running many contemporary games.
- As a result, few developers tried to target Macs, which meant Steam felt like a bit of a ghost town for Mac users.
- Store fragmentation with the App Store and Apple Arcade.
I think given the switch to Apple Silicon, and the fact that Apple platform users are typically willing to pay money for things, that the potential revenue share from Mac users could be a lot higher than 2.45% of the PC gaming market if the games were there.
EDIT: I do think that unless Apple does something more to jump start gaming on their platforms that it will never reach its potential. I think they should acquire some studios and pay for exclusives like their competitors do.
- david_allison 4y agoApple's removal of 32-bit support has significantly reduced the number of games which are natively available for newer Macs. Many users aren't going to go through the effort/expense of working around this.
- TheTon 4y agoThat’s a good point. A poor commitment to backwards compatibility on Apple’s part hasn’t helped. However, I assume they did it to smooth the transition to Apple Silicon. On the long view Apple Silicon is going to be a bigger benefit than the ability to run old games.
- agret 4y agoOn MacOS Mojave before Catalina ended support for 32 bit binaries I was surprised how many Steam titles were downloadable as Mac native. I'd say almost 20% of my library was downloadable for MacOS which impressed me a lot. Steam was the best thing for MacOS gaming, Catalina was the worst. Now that Apple are moving to ARM expect the library to shrink further.