No question, I think we're seeing this now. It seems that publishers are spending the time, effort and money to ensure games run on the steam deck but not the mac.
Here's
one site's calendar of AAA games being released this year
A quick and unofficial count looks to have about 175 games scheduled for release - as reported by that web page. Of that 175, 149 will include the PC (others are PS4/Xbox exclusives). If you search on that web page, for the word Mac you get 4 or 2% of all AAA games being released.
Now that page and other metrics do not show whether the game will run on a steam deck, Looking at
protondb and reading the dashboard correctly, it seems that 81% of the top 100 games have the platinum or gold designation regarding compatibility.
Seems like more popular and current games can and do run on the steam deck, where as only a handful of those games run on the Mac
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This reminds me of your
comment in another thread after I shared some Steam Mac gaming stats in response to someone saying ”Macs don’t have many games”. You wrote ”Just spouting number of games doesn’t really paint the full picture. Many AAA titles do not run on Macs, pure and simple.”
The discussion then was about Windows/PC vs Mac/macOS. Here in the same way your numbers don’t paint the full picture. There are a few facts that have to be considered before one can say we’re seeing a Steam Deck dominance over the Mac at the moment. Steam Deck has to have either a higher number of users/players or compatible games than Mac has.
According to the Steam survey in April 42.33% of Linux gamers used SteamOS Holo which is the OS for Steam Deck. Linux in total had 1.9% of the Steam user base which means Steam Deck had 0.8% of Steam’s user base. That is lower than 1.35% for Mac meaning there are fewer Steam Deck owners/gamers than Mac gamers on Steam today.
Neither can such a conclusion about the dominance of Steam Deck be made by looking at the number of available/verified/playable games today. Polygon’s game calendar is not for upcoming AAA games only. It’s a mix of AAA, AA and indie games. Those 149 PC titles are not only AAA games. For that reason one can’t say ”2% of all AAA games being released” are coming to Mac.
Since it seems fine to spout numbers this time I refer again to some better numbers that do paint the full picture. I mean if we’re going to make some conclusions why use a limited release list with only 175 games instead of the holy source itself, SteamDB?
According to SteamDB 11,558 Windows games are scheduled for release or have been released this year. 2,473 of those are planned for Mac. That’s over 21%, not 2%. Yes I’m talking about all types of games, not only AAA since your/Polygon’s list is about all types of games too. At the same time there are only 950 verified or playable games planned for release on Steam Deck. That’s about 8% of new games.
If we look at the number of existing games for Steam Deck it has 4,915 verified games. That’s about 3% of the Windows games. Apple Silicon alone has 4,762 native games (Mac App Store not included). Applegamingwiki has also 476 verified Rosetta games working on AS but that’s the number they have tested. The actual number is higher, if not much higher. That’s a total of 5,238 verified AS games (Mac App Store not included) which is more than Steam Deck’s 4,915. Steam Deck has also 10,126 playable games according to SteamDB. That’s the number of platinum/gold games. Mac has 45,933 playable games. Yes, many of those are 32-bit but again many are unverified 64-bit games.
Here is the most important fact in this discussion though. Steam Deck has to use a Wine compatibility layer in order to play all the Windows games. As we all know it’s called Proton. Without it Steam Deck would be a failure and people couldn’t run all those ”popular and current games”. There is also such a compatibility layer for Mac by the same team behind Proton. It’s called Crossover, by Codeweavers. SteamOS alone can’t handle all the Windows games just as macOS alone can’t do the same. If we’re allowed to include all the compatible Windows games with the help of Proton in this discussion we have to do the same for Mac with the help of Crossover, pure and simple.
This means that many of those popular AAA Windows games and many old 32-bit games can already run on Mac too. Old and new games like Left 4 Dead, Portal, Half-Life, Team Fortress, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, Sekiro, GTA V, Fallout, The Forest, The Division, Neir: Automata, Hogwarts Legacy and many many more run well and even better thanks to Apple Silicon Macs' superior HW compared to Steam Deck.
Proton being free and Crossover not is not the subject of the discussion about Steam Deck’s dominance. It’s about how many old and new Windows games the Deck and the Mac can play natively or through Wine. Valve pays for Proton to make it free. Even though Apple doesn’t do the same they did contribute freely to Crossover by making Game Porting Toolkit free to use, making it possible to play the latest Windows games with D3DMetal in Crossover. On Steam Deck it’s the developers who spend time, effort and money to make sure their games are compatible. On Mac it’s Codeweavers themselves who test different games together with the community and update the compatibility and include new versions of Apple Game Porting Toolkit. It’s the same job done by different people. Steam Deck owners enjoy it for free while Mac owners pay for it. In other words Mac owners contribute more to the Wine community and the development by paying for Crossover.
Spending the time and money doesn’t result in many extra sales for the developers/publishers. ”Doing Steam Deck, on paper, is not something that equates to a huge amount of extra sales, like doing a Switch version, for instance. But what it does – I hope – is to clearly communicate to our Steam players, and Valve, that we mean business.”,
according to Lavapotion, developer of the newly released Songs of Conquest. Interestingly enough at the same time they did also a Mac port which shows the Mac port is more than a statement and as the article says it’s more challenging to make a Steam Deck version than a Mac version because of the Deck’s limitations.
I just checked the Top 100 list of popular games on ProtonDB and about 79 of them either have native Mac port or run well in Crossover which is not surprising considering the many similarities between Proton and Crossover.
Again game release lists as Polygon’s can be deceiving and don’t paint the full picture. Most Mac gamers know that Mac games often are ported later or much later than the first PC releases. Many times they’re not even announced until a few weeks before the release. Such lists have been used before in this forum as proof. There was a long list two years ago with games like Frostpunk 2, Path of Exile 2, Kerbal Space 2, Hades 2 and Grid Legends as examples of games not coming to Mac. All those mentioned games are now coming to Mac. Even Polygon’s list which was updated in April lists Frostpunk 2 as PC only but 11 bit Studios just announced on May 17 a Mac port is coming to Mac App Store.
The bottom line is that Steam Deck is not more dominant than Mac in anyway today, neither by the number of players nor the number of compatible games. Most AAA Windows games that can be played on Steam Deck can be played on Mac, all with the help of Wine.
