Windows 8 Thunders Past Mac OS X on Steam | Hacker News Reader

Windows 8 Thunders Past Mac OS X on Steam

winsupersite.com

6 pointsvaultboy2112 comments

What an odd metric to cherry-pick. How much of Steam's catalog is even on Mac OS X?

There is no need to look at Steam statistics to feel good about Windows 8. Even if Windows 8 is a colossal failure it will still have over 100 million users within a year, more than enough to keep it ahead of Mac OS X.

I'm not sure if "Thunders" is the correct term here. It has roughly 44% more usage, which could be significant if Mac OS X didn't have less than 4% total usage.

I imagine that when Valve releases Steam for Linux, there will be headlines like "Linux rapidly encroaching on Mac OS X's usage share on Steam" when it hits like 1-2% total usage.

Of course Windows 8 is going to overtake Mac OS X, there are simply more gamers on Windows, and gamers tend to use the latest software, regardless of how terrible it is.

This is misleading. Windows 8 has just passed 10.7.4. There are 3 more recent Mac Versions that have a higher install base than Windows 8. Hell even Windows XP has more Users than Windows 8.

I think you might have misread the table. Windows 8 64 bit looks to have about a 1% lead on the four versions of Mac OS listed:

  Windows 8 64 bit 4.25% +2.40%

  MacOS 10.8.2 64 bit 1.49% -0.11%
  MacOS 10.6.8 64 bit 0.78% -0.20%
  MacOS 10.7.5 64 bit 0.72% +0.03%
  MacOS 10.7.4 64 bit 0.27% -0.27%

Edit: Formatting

..adding 'windows 8 (0.44%) and 'windows 8 64bit' (4.25%) gives us 4.69%

..adding all mac osx versions (1.49%, 0.78%, 0.72%, 0.27%) gives us 3.26%

No. According to the Steam hardware survey, for November 2012 Win8x64 has a 4.25% install base (less than WinVistax64). Win8x32 has .44%, so Win8 has a combined percentage of 4.69%. By comparison, the top four OSX versions have a combined percentage of 3.26%. WinXP has a combined percentage of 10.83%, and Linux isn't even a blip on their radar.

Source:http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Misleading is putting it kind of nicely. It's flame bait. According to their data, only Win8 64bit is surpassing OS X, and even those are segmented in to releases. What's more, the main argument is that Gabe called Win8 a waste of time, but is supporting Mac, but the great majority of the userbase is still on Win7 (over 70%), whereas Win8 combined is under 5%. WinXP has larger share than Win8.

People focus too much on percentages of installed users. Better to look at the total user count (and compare that to the engineering cost of supporting the platform). It doesn't matter if OS X has 3% or even 0.1% of users. If the number of addressable customers is high enough, then it can be worth it to support that platform.

[unrelated] just noticed this on the source site under 'primary display resolution':

6048 x 1080 [0.01% | +0.00%]

..where does this exist?

Spanned monitors.

source: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

I looked at the Steam data before I read the article. The data itself is interesting. The article is garbage.

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