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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
And there is Steam on Desktop. You buy a game once you can play it on every platform with Steam which is all the platforms. If you buy a game in the App Store, you're stuck to places Apple likes.