Meanwhile, in the Mac world...
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1kpggmu/the_stat...
https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1kpggmu/the_stat...
What I don't get is why Valve isn't backing such efforts financially. There are millions of wealthy mac owners out there with pretty capable hardware. That should translate into quite a bit of steam purchases.
I just got a shiny m4 max laptop. I run Steam on a much less capable crappy old Samsung laptop (via manjaro). Would I run that on my mac if I could? Yes. Would I be tempted to spend a bit of cash on some fun games. Probably. Am I doing that currently? No, because that crappy old Samsung is too old and most games don't run on it. And I'm not in a mood to buy a dedicated gaming machine. I might at some point but just not a priority. But I don't mind dropping a few euros on a game to entertain myself once in a while.
And with Apple's hostility towards gamers with moves like refusal to support OpenGL or Vulkan (adding extra Metal support work to their developers) and refusal to keep stable APIs for a long time for game developers, it makes sense for them to rather focus on a crowd that is easier to support.
When it comes to gaming, Apple is its own enemy since forever and has been similarly failing to gain serious traction even on iOS (considering how powerful the iOS hardware is). iPads could be Steam Decks of their time and Apple just never cared enough.
It's kind of hilarious and sad... but it works darn well and it's less work than porting to Metal and 64-bit macOS.
My point was that volunteers got quite far getting steam and many games running on macs with decent framerates. The main person driving this recently moved on from working on that. Likewise, Asahi linux is getting quite capable at running steam and lots of games. That too is being driven by a handful of people.
Supporting stuff like that doesn't sound like it should break the bank for Steam. Basically sponsor a few people; maybe hire a few more to support them. It's basically all working at this point, it just needs a bit of love and attention. This wouldn't take years of additional development. And once steam runs properly on macs with thousands of games running smoothly, a lot more people might be using steam on their macs.
Yes, they'd be picking a fight with Apple. But as Epyc (Unreal engine) is showing, those fights can be won if you have deep pockets. And Apple is under a lot of pressure to moderate their anti competitive behavior. Perfect timing for Valve to make some money of all this with a minimum of investment.
Tell me you're only interested in talking about the gaming you care about without telling me directly.
In simple terms, iOS is the only growth market in gaming. Consoles and PCs are basically stagnant, with around 200 million people worldwide in that market and that number hasn't moved in decades. The only growth being made is by raising game prices and making ever more expensive Pro consoles.
iOS is the biggest game market in terms of revenue. You can disregard the games on there, but Apple is laser-focused on that gaming revenue they're making. Apple is the biggest gaming company in the world by revenue.
Android is the main competitor here, and is struggling (low profit/sale). I guess handhelds like the Switch and Steam Deck might somewhat be relevant ?
If Valve were getting high numbers of people installing the macOS Steam client, and you can bet they do already have that telemetry, then they would take the platform more seriously. But most macOS users aren’t interesting in gaming on their Mac.
I remember reading something a few years ago about how Valve basically gave up on Mac due to Apple being a complete pain in the ass to work with.
Apple decided the benefits of moving to ARM outweighed the loss of gamers.
Gaming on Mac died when they killed 32bit support and didn’t support Vulkan. Apple has pretty consistently shown almost no effort in making gaming on Mac work so everyone else has just ignored it.