Maybe Value should give more an 10% of a thought to the Mac and make Steam not be terrible on the Mac first.
They don’t care about the Mac. They only care about Linux because it lets them ship the Steam Deck and have a hedge against MS.
The Mac is worse than an afterthought.
I would say Valve stand on the shoulder of giants with Wine and Vulkan, they just had tl connect the dots between the two.
If Apple itself would respect its gamer users it could spend sometime on these open projects, but knowing Apple, if they do anything it would be on a closed-source vendor lock-in style
Games have their own issues (you mentioned some). But the client is inexcusable.
It used to be dog slow and horribly buggy but recently it's been quite fine. More and more games run native as well.
If you can afford a Mac, you can afford a Steam Deck.
No it’s not. You can download and install anything you want from the web. Just like Windows.
The Mac App Store isn’t required. Largely NO ONE uses it.
But compared to the iOS store it’s kind of a ghost town. Tons of popular software isn’t in it. It’s quite normal to just download software instead of even looking to see if it’s in there.
And if it is, App Store software must be fully and tightly sandboxed. Which prevents a lot of useful software from ever appearing in it.
> Largely NO ONE uses it.
Furthermore,
> App Store software must be fully and tightly sandboxed
I get that many things will not be able to function due to these restrictions, but for most software they are a good thing.
For a lot of things I’m happy for sandboxing. Why should random games or todo apps need more access? But the fact you can’t get good backup software like Backblaze is a problem. They need more options for levels of sandboxing, including possibly none (with heavy review).
And just like with Windows Valve is trying to build on an open platform instead.
It stands to reason that Steam on Mac is bad in comparison because of Apple.
How? It’s software like any other. There’s TONS of great software on the Mac made by 3rd parties. It can be nice. It can run fast. MS does it. Adobe does it. Indie developers do it. So why is it Apple’s fault?
The story tends that gets passed around is that no one at Valve (more or less) works in it.
I’m not talking about the games Steam sells. I’m talking about the Steam client.
If they rewrote it in Electron (instead of whatever custom thing it uses) they could do a terrible job and it would still be faster.
I’m not even asking for it to be “Mac like”, just act like showing a store page isn’t a Herculean effort.
Apple also fully dropped 32-bit support, breaking a lot of older games that had been ported to Mac on Steam.
Even Windows running on ARM has emulation for 32-bit x86 apps.
On Valve’s side they gave very little love to the Steam client on Mac and didn’t bother to update their own games (Half Life, Portal, Counterstrike, etc) to 64-bit to keep them working on Macs.
The biggest thing that has changed is now Apple ships much better GPU power even in its cheapest Macs. They still aren’t equivalent to dedicated gaming PCs but are plenty to run a huge library of casual and older games, if only there were a convenient and well-maintained path to running them.
Don’t know. But that’s what they’ve done.
If I were Apple, I wouldn’t partner with someone who clearly didn’t give 2 shits about my platform.
(In reality Value doesn’t need Apple. And Apple would never partner anyway, they don’t do that)
Very smart to leverage that failure of Steam Machine into a portable form factor. A bit ugly and clearly some cut corners, but the price saved on no Windows license speaks for itself.
You can use any tool to make apps and sell them online without having to get them approved in the Mac App Store (which almost no one buys from).