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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

There are more Steam gamers on Linux than there are on MacOS (2.08% Linux vs. 1.37% Mac)[0]. Gaming is pretty dead on Macs.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

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The question wasn't "is it dead" but "will it recover"? And sadly I think not.

I'm certainly not going to buy ports of years old games on the app store where they're expensive and mac exclusive when i can get them multiplatform and for much less on Steam - if I haven't already finished them years ago. <cough> Death Stranding lol. I preordered that on launch.

And I use one x86 box, one PS5 and two Macs. I'm just not uninformed enough to overpay Cook for games.

Does that 2.08% Linux include the Deck btw? I couldn't figure it out by expanding.

I just found it surprising how dead it is (according to Steam, anyways). Apple will have to do something drastic (and uncharacteristic) to recover.

> Does that 2.08% Linux include the Deck btw?

[edit] I think I was wrong, see sibling comment which indicates that 41% of Linux users are on the Deck's OS.

I wonder if I'm counted once, thrice or four times. I've ran Steam at least once on both windows and linux on the x86 box and on both macs...

Edit to answer the reply below this one:

I have no idea how many times I got the hardware survey popup, but I always click Yes on it. It's possible I wasn't counted for Linux because I don't really use that install. The x86 box is headless and I steam stream games off it to the macs that have monitors. That doesn't seem to work from Linux.

Unless things have changed, the survey is opt-in and thus it's a statistical sampling. Over the many, many years[0] that I've run Steam, I've gotten the survey pop-up maybe 4-5 times, although I'm not a heavy gamer so Steam isn't installed and running all the time.

[0] Since HL2 or maybe the Orange Box. I'm old.

The Deck shows up as "Steam OS Holo". Which is 41% of the Linux category (or 0.85% overall). For whatever reason Valve never updated the combined view to show Steam OS Holo.

A good start would be to support some existing API (Vulcan and OpenGL) instead of making their own (Metal).

Or throw in the towel and do what Linux gaming did and just make a compatibility layer for Windows APIs and DirectX (wine/proton). Though this compatibility layer stuff has big issues with anti cheat software making it not really suitable for many online games.

Games written with Vulkan can run on MacOS with the help of the MoltenVK [1]. You don't need to rewrite the game, just recompile for MacOS. The game can use Vulkan API but loads the MoltenVK shared library at runtime. It acts as a translation layer for Metal which is very similar to Vulkan. There are some gotchas, such as you can not use geometry shaders because Metal does not support them.

[1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK

> You don't need to rewrite the game, just recompile for MacOS.

The word "just" does a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. First you need to get your game running on ARM64, which likely won't work out-of-the-box unless you already ported to smartphone/Nintendo Switch. Then you simply map all the functionality to MacOS syscalls, debug a second version of your game, polish it, and release it but without Metal support so you can use MoltenVK to run it. The number of video games that fall into this category of "released for 64-bit MacOS but doesn't support Metal" is minuscule. 99% of the video games released today are an x86 Windows binary, and if you can't run that you're boned. Developers will not build you a special MacOS version of their Vulkan game so you can mess around with translation layers.

You could also use Linux and get upstream Vulkan drivers that work out-of-the-box. Apple's obsession over Metal is part of the reason I left MacOS and I truly pity anyone that depends on MoltenVK to run their favorite software.

Yeah the fact that you have to compile a separate binary is already too much work for most developers. Just not worth the effort for less then 2% market share.

The 2.08% cover all Linux users: Deck and non-Deck users. You have to check distro details for the breakdown. SteamOS Holo (Deck distro) is 40.97% of the Linux users.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux

> I'm just not uninformed enough to overpay Cook for games

But yet you think Apple is responsible for Steam pricing ?

I’m impressed by how well semi-recent games run on my M3 Macbook using GPTK and Rosetta through Whisky. (30-60fps on high settings at the native ~2k resolution.) Apple could turn the Mac into a truly great gaming platform if they had a team dedicated to building and maintaining something akin to Proton. Alas…

They kind of do with the GPT, but it’s not as simple as just opening a Windows exe.

Need to go through the motions of configuring per game as it’s not meant to be end user software.

And I don’t think you can publish games using it directly. Still have to do the port itself.

Well, that’s kind of my point. I can eventually run most games, but there’s a lot of hacky, manual work involved. The Steam Deck is a massive success, I think, because Valve puts in a ton of effort under the hood to ensure that most arbitrary games “just work” and that everything is wrapped up in a lovely and functional user interface.

Also, at least for now, I get the impression that the GPTK (and Rosetta, for that matter) are meant to be temporary shims that will go away in the future.

I question the accuracy of those statistics. I’m one of the few people who game on macOS and almost exclusively use Steam via CrossOver, so I wouldn’t be included in that 1.37%. The same was true before the Apple Silicon era when I used Boot Camp.

Why would we be? We’re gaming against Apple’s wishes.

tbh many of those "Linux users" are probably Steam Deck users who are unaware that they're running Linux.

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