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It isn't a huge market though. Mac has never been particularly big for gaming, they've always come in very low on the steam hardware survey. Now, post-ARM, it'

It isn't a huge market though. Mac has never been particularly big for gaming, they've always come in very low on the steam hardware survey. Now, post-ARM, it's beat by Linux even.

FroshKiller 2y ago
I don't think the Steam hardware survey is representative of the market size. Most people with Macs are accustomed to games that should run just fine on them never getting released, which means there often isn't any point to installing Steam on a Mac in the first place. Therefore they wouldn't be represented even though they are gamers, they spend money, and they have Macs. I don't have a PC for personal use, but I do have a lot of game consoles, an M1 MacBook Pro, and an M2 Mac mini. There are lots of games like Pizza Tower that look fun to me, do not have a Mac version, but do have a Switch version. So I wind up spending money on Switch games that would've gone to Steam if the publisher had bothered with a macOS release. While I do have Steam installed on my M1 and M2, I rarely launch it because I've only bought eight games off Steam in two years because of this dynamic, meaning I haven't even participated in the survey myself. My Steam account is over 20 years old and has a healthy library from when I was a PC gamer. I'd say my money's on the table, but my money's in Nintendo's wallet. But I'd really rather be buying macOS versions!
jillesvangurp 2y ago
That's because Steam barely works on modern macs. After they killed 32 bit support, most of my games stopped working. Even at the best of times, only a fraction of the games worked on mac. And now with essentially all macs running arm processors, the only macs left running steam are from last decade. So all these surveys prove is that a market that they barely supported wasn't very large. And you forget that one of the largest gaming platforms out there is the iphone. Which also doesn't show up in the steam hardware survey because steam doesn't run on it. The iphone market proves that there is a gaming market for typical Apple users. A very big market even. People that spend a lot of money on their phone also seem to like spending a lot of money in the app store. And mostly on games. Apple rakes in billions via the app store. If Steam were to get Mac support to the same level it is on Linux, most of the games would start working and there are a shitload of Apple PCs and laptops out there that would be able to run that.
- Novosell 2y ago
  People who play phone games wont convert to playing desktop games. My mother-in-law has spent untold amounts of money on candy crush, on her iPhone, has a 10 year old windows desktop and talks shit about her daughter playing videogames games from time to time. If you've got some data saying the correlation is very high, alright. But I don't believe it is. Also, where is Apple's responsibility in all this? Steam this, Steam that. Apple changes arch, doesn't support vulkan and removes 32-bit support and then it's Steam's job to chase Apple? EA, Ubisoft, CD Project, Epic and Actiblizzard all also have store fronts and don't care to support mac. They could all be asleep behind the wheel, true. Or it could be that Apple makes it too annoying to support a platform that would barely yield any sales. If Steam, a tiny company in comparison, and Codeweavers, also an tiny company in comparison, can get games to run on Proton+Linux then I'm pretty sure that Apple, with a little help from their trillion dollars, can manage something. But they also don't care cause Steam wont give 30%, which is Steam's fault of course.

It isn't a huge market though. Mac has never been particularly big for gaming, they've always come in very low on the steam hardware survey. Now, post-ARM, it's beat by Linux even.

FroshKiller 2y ago

I don't think the Steam hardware survey is representative of the market size. Most people with Macs are accustomed to games that should run just fine on them never getting released, which means there often isn't any point to installing Steam on a Mac in the first place. Therefore they wouldn't be represented even though they are gamers, they spend money, and they have Macs. I don't have a PC for personal use, but I do have a lot of game consoles, an M1 MacBook Pro, and an M2 Mac mini. There are lots of games like Pizza Tower that look fun to me, do not have a Mac version, but do have a Switch version. So I wind up spending money on Switch games that would've gone to Steam if the publisher had bothered with a macOS release. While I do have Steam installed on my M1 and M2, I rarely launch it because I've only bought eight games off Steam in two years because of this dynamic, meaning I haven't even participated in the survey myself. My Steam account is over 20 years old and has a healthy library from when I was a PC gamer. I'd say my money's on the table, but my money's in Nintendo's wallet. But I'd really rather be buying macOS versions!

jillesvangurp 2y ago

That's because Steam barely works on modern macs. After they killed 32 bit support, most of my games stopped working. Even at the best of times, only a fraction of the games worked on mac. And now with essentially all macs running arm processors, the only macs left running steam are from last decade. So all these surveys prove is that a market that they barely supported wasn't very large. And you forget that one of the largest gaming platforms out there is the iphone. Which also doesn't show up in the steam hardware survey because steam doesn't run on it. The iphone market proves that there is a gaming market for typical Apple users. A very big market even. People that spend a lot of money on their phone also seem to like spending a lot of money in the app store. And mostly on games. Apple rakes in billions via the app store. If Steam were to get Mac support to the same level it is on Linux, most of the games would start working and there are a shitload of Apple PCs and laptops out there that would be able to run that.

Novosell 2y ago
People who play phone games wont convert to playing desktop games. My mother-in-law has spent untold amounts of money on candy crush, on her iPhone, has a 10 year old windows desktop and talks shit about her daughter playing videogames games from time to time. If you've got some data saying the correlation is very high, alright. But I don't believe it is. Also, where is Apple's responsibility in all this? Steam this, Steam that. Apple changes arch, doesn't support vulkan and removes 32-bit support and then it's Steam's job to chase Apple? EA, Ubisoft, CD Project, Epic and Actiblizzard all also have store fronts and don't care to support mac. They could all be asleep behind the wheel, true. Or it could be that Apple makes it too annoying to support a platform that would barely yield any sales. If Steam, a tiny company in comparison, and Codeweavers, also an tiny company in comparison, can get games to run on Proton+Linux then I'm pretty sure that Apple, with a little help from their trillion dollars, can manage something. But they also don't care cause Steam wont give 30%, which is Steam's fault of course.