I can only speak for myself but I've never had an issue with steam on macOS
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Counter-Strike 2 Lacks Mac Support, Update Breaks CS:GO for macOS
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I can only speak for myself but I've never had an issue with steam on macOS
You came just to say something bad about Apple? If you read the story, then Apple has absolutely nothing to do with this
Nobody buys a Mac for gaming but that doesn't mean people don't want to play games on their Macs.
Well, I wouldn't buy a Mac solely to use it as a dedicated gaming machine.
But it's fairly likely that someone that has a Mac would want to have some games on it, be it higher end titles like RE8, Lies of P, etc, or lower end titles such as Dave the Diver or Inscryption.
This can't be stated enough. This is why my M2 Ultra Mac Studio does more work than my i9 and 4090 setup. In some workflows, the M2 Ultra is FASTER. But people just hook into NVIDIA too much that nothing.....NOTHING can beat a 4090. I have proof right here, and you provided evidence with graphs. After Effects is one of those areas I prefer to use my Mac vs my Windows system. There are many others, especially video editing. Especially with the videos I deal with that are 8-10 hours long. You know how long the differences scale up between Windows and Mac on exporting those massive videos? People just love to do 5 minute tests on YouTube, but scale that up to 10 HOURS......and Mac is a definite benefit.
Precisely, but this will be why Macs will never truly reach parity levels that people here expect. Honestly, so many "bad" comments were raised that we are getting Death Stranding, No Mans Sky, Resident Evil 4 etc. Comments keep saying these are "old" games or "PS4 games". What do you honestly expect? Windows doesn't even get parity in some cases.....especially with the Playstation side, but there are still third party that takes longer to port to Windows. And you expect Macs to be higher or the same importance? Will never happen.
Like I said, if I am working and want a quick break I play some games here and there on Mac (like Dave the Diver or Factorio or even No Mans Sky). But when I want to dive fully into my hobby after a long day, and have immediate access to my 500+ game library, I will turn on my Windows system. Until every single Windows game exists on Mac (which will never happen), Macs will never be the gaming platform people strive for. So lower the expectations a bit, we might see a slight increase in more games being ported, but don't expect a whole lot more than that.
It’s likely that someone at Valve make a simple mistake to verify versions before running the update which created an epic (pun intended) fail for Mac users. They are probably digging through code figuring out how to fix this. Steam, likely at the request of Valve, removed the Mac support icon so that no future downloads would occur until the issue gets fixed.
Don’t forget, this is also a problem for Windows users as well who lost the original game which is perfectly playable on their current hardware for one that does not feel optimized.
Usually if you are going to retire a platform, you make an announcement which sets dates and expectations. You don’t pull support blindly and disable users. At least not if you want to make money and stay in business.
I work in software development and that’s how you handle this professionally. Valve’s PR team is not doing a good job of communication so our worst impulses tend to fill in the vacuum.
Don’t forget, this is also a problem for Windows users as well who lost the original game which is perfectly playable on their current hardware for one that does not feel optimized.
Usually if you are going to retire a platform, you make an announcement which sets dates and expectations. You don’t pull support blindly and disable users. At least not if you want to make money and stay in business.
I work in software development and that’s how you handle this professionally. Valve’s PR team is not doing a good job of communication so our worst impulses tend to fill in the vacuum.
You're absolutely right. Tired of these "no one buys a Mac for gaming" comments. We buy Macs for various reasons and MANY people who buy Macs ALSO enjoy gaming.
That would only be "always" if time hadn't begun before 2022.
For the most part, the share of Mac users fluctuated roughly around 3.0, 3.5%. Early on, it was even significantly higher.
(I'm wondering what happened late 2017/early 2018…)
Look at the graph. The evident, steady decline started around 2020/2021. That is long after Valve introduced Proton and thus made Linux gaming more feasible (2018), and long before the release of the Steam Deck.
The in part wild fluctuations month over month are due to the way Valve creates their statistic: they do not count operating system versions and/or Linux distributions below a certain threshold towards the parent platform (i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux). In the past, they have lumped these together in the indiscriminate "Others" category, now they seem to ignore them for their main statistic all together. Which is methodological bull****, but here we are…
That would only be "always" if time hadn't begun before 2022.
For the most part, the share of Mac users fluctuated roughly around 3.0, 3.5%. Early on, it was even significantly higher.
(I'm wondering what happened late 2017/early 2018…)
Look at the graph. The evident, steady decline started around 2020/2021. That is long after Valve introduced Proton and thus made Linux gaming more feasible (2018), and long before the release of the Steam Deck.
The in part wild fluctuations month over month are due to the way Valve creates their statistic: they do not count operating system versions and/or Linux distributions below a certain threshold towards the parent platform (i.e. Windows, Mac, Linux). In the past, they have lumped these together in the indiscriminate "Others" category, now they seem to ignore them for their main statistic all together. Which is methodological bull****, but here we are…
Interesting graph! Where did you find it? Well if you go back that long you could say it's declining but again the most truthful info would be the actual number. As I said if the total number of active Steam users has increased over the years, which it has but the Mac user base remains the same the percentage will show a decline.
I went through the historical Steam statistics via the Wayback Machine and hacked the numbers into Excel.
Yeah, I had a bit too much time today…
I'm pointing out the irony considering trivial updates, often permanent or very difficult to reverse, and breaking software is as Apple life as it getsYou came just to say something bad about Apple? If you read the story, then Apple has absolutely nothing to do with this
It at least makes sense that changing the game to a completely different engine won't automatically run on macOS, which is not at all their priority. We'll see if they'll make it available as it only just got official release on PC.
Ok, but even then, there are limits to how much gaming can go onto Macs (given the market). Statistically speaking, you'll reach a point where unless you're willing to go with what's available, you can count on the games you'd like to NOT be on there.
Before you spew bs or get too cheeky, please learn some history:
Oh, but we can go a bit further back:
It's already bad enough that they refused to even patch their old games to run on x86-64 mode (probably just a recompile away) so they would be compatible with Catalina, let alone Apple Silicon Macs through Rosetta 2, but actually borking a currently installed and working title should be lawsuit-worthy.
Does anyone remember when Bungie focused on Mac games? Man I loved "Myth: the Fallen Lords". Such a great game and so ahead of its time, IMO.
And then Microsoft bought them and suddenly they were like, "Macs suck!"
And then Microsoft bought them and suddenly they were like, "Macs suck!"
I see, I see.
So, if not for games, what do you connect a controller to your Mac for? They're surprisingly bad at typing letters, after all.
Of course it is, because they’re pissed off at Apple and don’t want to deal with them.
Apple is making game development for the Mac almost impossible. It’s no wonder this is a problem.
As Quinn from the YouTube channel Snazzy Labs said: Macs can game, but Apple can’t.
They’ve behaved in ways that are openly hostile to nearly the entire industry. It doesn’t matter that the hardware is now the best laptops for gaming in the industry in terms of hardware. It runs MacOS, so your gaming is going to be crippled.
It only chance now is to patch and update and maintain GPT. If for whatever reason they removed Rosetta 2 we are absolutely hosed.
I've seen Linus and Dawid and all that trying to give their... 'informed opinions' on Mac gaming.
Quite frankly, I'd rather trust the neighbourhood cat, and all she cares about is a warm lap and a smooth framerate for whatever I'm playing, in case she decides to watch.
Tech youtubers are slightly more reliable than people who plop out the Gabe interviews where he says that Apple doesn't care, and those interviews are so old that Steve Jobs was still alive and CEO of Apple, and the iMac came with 1 GB RAM and a 128 MB graphics card made by ATI.
In fairness, there is a slightly more recent interview that gets trotted out by Gabe, which is still so old that iMacs came with 4 GB RAM and a 512 MB graphics card made by AMD.
I'll ask you this. Did MacRumors cover Lies of P being announced? When was the last review of a game by MacWorld? Was Capcom's coverage of RE8 on Mac at TGS last year covered, or the CEO of Capcom PLAYING RE8 and RE4 on an iPad live on stage covered?
Apple's not perfect. But they've done a damn sight more for Mac gaming in the past 5 years than the tech youtubers, than the gaming journalists, and by Valve.
MacOS, despite getting more gaming capable hardware, has fallen behind Linux in marketshare.
Your whole thing about your cat is stupid nonsense. The tech YouTubers here are simply explaining why they think this is - it is an indisputable fact that it is the case.
Most AAA games do not work in macOS, and even those that worked in the past have stopped working for a variety of reasons, usually involving deprecating old API’s and then removing them with no way to reinstall, or an architectural change.
The Mac App Store is terrible for discovering the best games on the platform, and they’ve pissed off Valve, they’ve pissed off Blizzard, and they have been shipping almost no useful gaming laptops for over a decade, and only now is it starting to change.
It’s terrible, and it is entirely Apple’s fault.
There are innumerable “types” of Mac and MacBook customers, but here are two major ones:
1.) The more “MacBook Air” type owners: grade school, high school or college students who use — usually Mac notebooks — for online research, word processing, note taking, Notion, generative A.I., Microsoft suite, Google suite, Google drive (and — for fun — web browsing, iMessage, FaceTime, Social Media, reddit, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu and games).
2.) The more desktop Mac or MacBook Pro crowd: Creative Pros who use Adobe Suites (including Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects, Animate, Illustrator), DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Logic Pro, Ableton, FL Studio, Autodesk Sketchbook and Maya, Blender, Pencil2D, Moho Pro, GIMP, Slack…
These two major Mac consumer groups get a LOT out of their Macs and prefer them enough not to be too troubled by the lack of AAA console games compared to the PC.
“Gaming Mode” in macOS was made pretty apparent, but Apple also quietly announced at WWDC23 its newest Game Porting Toolkit with a translation layer for Windows DirectX 9–12-&-Direct3D-to-Metal 3 translation, DirectInput and XAudio2 translation, other API translation — even some Rosetta-like ×86_64 game instructions to Apple Silicon translation(!) — strictly for development purposes, though.
No gaming company or game developer can include the toolkit when shipping their game.
It’s strictly a tool and a “simulator” to demonstrate to game developers/coders how their games would look and work IF they ported them to Mac (but wrote them specifically for Apple’s Metal 3 and other APIs instead of DirectX 12, etc. — bringing their performance up to native speeds — or faster).
Being translations, they obviously don’t work as fast as they would if they were optimized for Apple Silicon and Apple APIs, but it gives game developers a glimpse of their games running on macOS and Macs.
It’s a pretty extensive project and the Apple software engineers who did it deserve a little appreciation here!
It’s similar to Valve’s ProtonDB on Linux. Valve didn’t grace the Mac platform with these kinds of efforts, so Apple did. (But I’ll bet Apple Arcade had something to do with Valve’s apparent dissing the Mac.)
So Apple’s doing something to woo AAA game developers, but it obviously appears they need more incentives than this toolkit.
Developers are being sold on translation, not on the appeal and superiority of Apple’s proprietary APIs and Frameworks.
(Being taught only how to translate was the whole reason Americans never took to the metric system…)
btw, “Satin” on git was shaping up to be a very interesting, very promising use of the Metal 3 API…
(The Satin Framework project needs crowd funding, though! — BAD! — if it’s to proceed, so find a way to donate if you really do want to see more and better games on the Mac platform. Maybe check with @Rezaali on “X”.)
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Translation is nice and all, but at some point, and somehow, Apple has to sell game developers on its own APIs or they’ll never be weaned off the crufty old Windows ones.
(win32 DirectInput/DirectOutput legacy crap… Apple’s always been the only one in the industry who drags people kicking and screaming into the future…)
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