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Comment by smith7018

2 years ago

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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smith7018

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nordsieck  2 years ago

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?

015a  2 years ago

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.

ascagnel_  2 years ago

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.

  • goosedragons  2 years ago

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

flohofwoe  2 years ago

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.

  • mschuster91  2 years ago

    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...

    • qwytw  2 years ago

      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.

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