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Comment by smith7018 | Hacker News Reader

Surprised that macOS is gaining more than Linux. For some reason, I imagine there are more Steam Deck sales (Linux) than there are macOS users deciding to download Steam but maybe it's a numbers game.

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I think it's more about the games people want to play. I certainly wouldn't buy a mac to game on. But if you already have one and it runs the games you want to play (factorio, for example), then why not just use it?

Baulders Gate 3 has quite great Apple Silicon & MacOS support. I know of a few normally-non-gamers who loaded that up on their Mac over the past couple months.

Games tend to ride the new release schedule more than most other forms of media (except maybe new movie releases in theaters), and there have been a few notable releases in the past few weeks. Apple had a big push with Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 4 Remake in the past few months; if you already own those games on Steam, you got the Mac versions of those games at no additional charge. Also, Baldur's Gate 3 (which is widely regarded as one of the best games of 2023) got a native Mac release in Q4.

As for it being a numbers game, neither Apple nor Valve release direct hardware sales numbers, so only they will know.

The Mac versions of Resident Evil 8 (not 7) and RE4 Remake are exclusive to the Mac App Store. They aren't on Steam.

The ARM Macs are actually quite decent for less demanding games, even when running under Intel emulation. FWIW I started to play a couple of strategy games on my Mac over the holidays because I was away from my gaming PC and only had my Mac available.

Good luck finding macOS games in the first place. I've had to pass on quite the few games because they were only made for Windows...

For the niche of realtime strategy games it's actually not too bad ;)

Also good luck running most macOS games that were published 5-10 years ago or more and not updated. Apple really doesn't care about backwards compatibility at all which I think is a bigger issues for games than most other software. MS OTH is doing an exceptionally good job at this in comparison.

At the cost of ARM compatibility. Microsoft is doing as atrocious a job at ARM Windows than Apple is at its gaming ordeals. All that being said, I would never want Apple to change its ways. They've given us extraordinary ARM laptops that don't even have fans!

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