Surprising to see people still using Steam statistics without fully understanding the mechanisms and data behind it despite all previous discussions and explanations. With different comparison points statistics can show something meaningful and relevant or something misleading and useless. It all depends on the point of view and the purpose. When it comes to Mac gaming it’s no news that some people always tend to pick the worst comparison points for some strange personal reasons.
To start with, the Linux market share on Steam consists of two parts, desktop Linux and Steam Deck OS. Last month the total number was 2.06% but that consists of 34.93% for SteamOS Holo which is Steam Deck’s OS and 65.07% for desktop Linux. It means that Steam Deck had 0.72% market share and Linux had 1.34%. With 1.4% macOS still has a bigger share than Linux. That has been the case since Steam Deck was included in the statistics so Linux has never surpassed macOS and it was only after two years of market growth that Steam Deck and Linux together could have a larger market share in 2024, but each on its own still has smaller market share.
Another important fact is that Steam survey shows a platform’s market share compared to the total number of monthly active users on Steam, based on a small survey with thousands randomly selected users out of probably 175 million monthly users. It can never be considered as an accurate representation of the actual numbers. This has been addressed in tech media before.
ExtremeTech says ”We've always warned readers that the SHS might not be accurate, based on problems we've observed in the data set in the past, but it's never been clear what the problems were”.
According to Scott Herkelman, Senior VP & GM Graphics Business Unit at AMD, ”Steam's survey isn't meant to measure hardware market share for companies. It's supposed to tell developers what kind of products are in-market. Valve has never been particularly concerned with making sure its numbers track real-life market share.”
That’s the reason AMD has always been underrepresented in the survey. "They did change their algorithm a little bit, but they really aren't motivated to go in and change this, because the purpose of their data is not for market share. The purpose of their data is to show general trends to game developers. It definitely doesn't track our real share. You can see the same thing actually happen in our CPU share. It's still under-represented”.
Tom’s HW says ”I've followed the Steam Hardware Survey for a long time, wondering at the statistics behind the data. The past few months give me (even more) reason to suspect it isn't a proper random sampling of users, which means no one should attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions. Valve has never revealed any details of how the survey gets conducted, but I suspect (based on being sampled on three different PCs all within a day or two of each other, all of which were using a 3080 card for testing) there's a higher chance for it to ask for someone's hardware details if it doesn't recognize the graphics card".
"This means new cards like the RTX 30-series are much more likely to get included. However, that's just a guess, and it's possible Valve is actually doing a proper random sampling and simply hasn't made that fact public. Still, without a clear explanation of the methodology, we shouldn't take these figures as any true indication of the distribution of various GPU models or other hardware, even among Steam users”.
”Let me close by once again calling on Valve to do the right thing and provide a clear statement on the statistics behind the survey. If it's a random sampling, tell us so we (and more importantly, game developers) know we can put more confidence in the numbers, and tell us (approximately) how many PCs were surveyed. And if it's not a proper statistical analysis, then fix it. Thousands of undergrad statistics students could explain what needs to be changed. It would also be great to allow numbers nerds like me to get the full list of GPUs, even for those with only a 0.01% share”.
ExtremeTech says ”The one thing that makes no sense in all this is why Valve doesn't care about inaccuracies in its own data set. The purpose of the SHS may not be to present accurate market share data, but presenting developers with inaccurate data is scarcely better. The only conclusion we can draw is that Valve doesn't feel whatever inaccuracy remains is enough to impact what developers do. AMD obviously felt strongly enough about the topic to publicly state the problems with using the SHS for market share estimates”.
That is perhaps the most important point here. Even Valve itself didn’t start the survey to know market shares but what system specifications to target before releasing Half-Life 2. We’ve heard all kinds of arguments here about declining Mac market share, Mac gaming being ”doomed” and developers having no reasons to make Mac games but I’ve always said that Mac game developers know their market best. Otherwise we wouldn’t get all kinds of games for decades.
What’s most important for the developers is actual numbers, not numbers in relation to other numbers. What matters is how many potential Mac gamers would play a certain game, how many copies the game would sell and if those numbers are large enough for doing a Mac port. So even with Steam’s own numbers there are more than 2.5 million Mac gamers and that’s enough for big and small developers to bring AAA/AA/indie games to Mac.
Another reason for the supposedly declining Mac market share on Steam can be simple math. If the number of Mac users stays the same or grows slower than the other platforms the declining share doesn’t mean the number has decreased, but that the other numbers have grown. The accurate way would be to compare the actual Mac numbers with each other over the years. Only then we would know if the number of Mac gamers is increasing or decreasing.
Another more accurate way of measurement is the number of released Mac games. Steamdb shows that on the contrary more Mac games have been released each year since 2019 with a record-breaking of 6238 games last year, only on Steam. So why are developers releasing more and more AAA/AA/indie Mac games in different stores if Mac market share is shrinking according to some PC gamers? Because as explained above Steam stats don’t show the important truth and developers rely on their experience and other metrics, not Steam survey. In 2023 16% of the devs at GDC were working on a Mac project. Last year the number increased to 23%, surpassing Switch projects.
View attachment 2479947
View attachment 2479948
