Neil Hughes
A total of 8.46 percent of Steam users in May 2010 were on some version of Apple's operating system, with Mac OS X 10.6.3, Mac OS X 10.6, and Mac OS X 10.5.8. The new data is a part of Steam's monthly hardware survey, which presents data about the kind of computers users of the service have.
Apple's debut compared with 6.95 percent of users on the 64-bit version of Microsoft's last-generation operating system, Windows Vista. Another 0.55 percent were seen running Windows XP 64 bit, while 0.35 percent were reported as Windows 2003 64 bit.
May represents the first time that Mac OS X users have been able to officially use the Steam service within Mac OS X, since the application was released. Apple made a splash, with all listed versions of Windows losing market share when Mac OS X was added into the equation.
The far-away winner remains the 32-bit version of Windows XP, which 32.89 percent of Steam gamers were running as their operating system. That was followed by 24.77 percent of users on Windows 7 64 bit, 14.66 percent on Windows Vista 32 bit, and 11.15 percent of users on Windows 7 32 bit.
In an exclusive interview with AppleInsider in March, John Cook, director of Steam development at Valve, said that the monthly hardware reports could prove to be a great asset for developers who are interested in bringing their titles to Mac OS X. Details such as operating system, processor and graphics card give a clear indication how well a title will run on a user's system.
"One thing for certain is that the Mac market will be a lot less of a mystery to the game industry as we add Mac hardware statistics to our ongoing hardware survey," Cook said.
Steam is digital game distribution platform which has more than 25 million users and offers access to 1,100 games on the PC. Developer Valve has said it will treat the Mac as a "first-tier" platform, meaning new major titles developed for the PC will release day-and-date with the Mac.
High-profile releases from Valve for Mac OS X so far have included Game of the Year award winners Portal and Half-Life 2. Valve has also made native OS X support for the Source engine available to licensees for use in their games. The company has also made its Steamworks suite of publishing and development tools available on the Mac platform, including product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, anti-cheat technology, and more.
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71 Comments
Seriously?!? How can you put such a misleading title on the article... and why? 8% adoption is huge, but at the same time, the title implies that OSX is blowing the snot out of M$, when it is nearly an order of magnitude less!
why why why???
Thing is, market share for Windows will naturally drop when a new platform is introduced. Of course, when you have 0 percent it's easy to make the other platforms decline in percentage. The real question is, did those gamers stop using Windows because of Steam?
"Apple's debut compared with 6.95 percent of users on the 64-bit version of Microsoft's last operating system, Windows Vista."Really??? That's news to me. What's Windows 7 then?
In more recent news Microsoft Insider reports that MS mobile operating system has a larger market share then Apple's last mobile operating system, Iphone OS 1.0 French version.
It's impressive that OS X has such a strong representation but the way this article is written and the headline is pure fluff.
Seriously. Reads right out of the Fox News playbook for headline writing.
I was excited to get Steam and finally thought I'd be free of the bootcamp partition taking up space on my Macbook Pro's SSD ... but nope. Though the games run, they run much slower than in Windows 7 on the exact same hardware. The drops in framerate are especially noticable in busy scenes.
Until Apple provides tuned driver support for OSX, and provides better than years-behind GPU tech in their desktops, gamers will simply not be switching en masse to OSX. Besides the fact that without DirectX, the vast majority of titles will simply never get ported and those that do, will have to run OpenGL for worse picture quality and performance.
I may use OSX on my work machine, but for gaming, I'm not leaving Windows any time soon.
"Apple's debut compared with 6.95 percent of users on the 64-bit version of Microsoft's last operating system, Windows Vista."
Really??? That's news to me. What's Windows 7 then?
Windows 7 is the current operating system, Vista is the last one. The word 'previous' instead of 'last' would have been clearer but that's what it meant.
Though the games run, they run much slower than in Windows 7 on the exact same hardware. The drops in framerate are especially noticable in busy scenes.
It's only been out for a little while though and it mostly still plays smoothly at maximum quality (i.e above the 30FPS threshold). There's a bug somewhere in the drivers causing framerate drops and updated drivers are coming with 10.6.4.
Besides the fact that without DirectX, the vast majority of titles will simply never get ported and those that do, will have to run OpenGL for worse picture quality and performance.
The Source engine uses DirectX too and the quality is on par with the Windows version. The water effects look pretty much identical on the Mac vs Windows:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/adurdin...85104/sizes/l/
The real question is, did those gamers stop using Windows because of Steam?
It's probably due to Mac users no longer playing via Bootcamp. Just before the Steam launch, I was playing HL2 via Steam but switched to playing Episode 1 on the Mac side and I suspect a few people did the same.