My understanding is that Valve hasn't updated Steam to be able to host ARM binaries. I don't think it's possible to host a native M1 game on there right now.
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Interesting graph in GDC game developer poll.
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Valve, very silently, updated Steam in mid September to support Apple Silicon binaries.
There's currently about 340ish titles on there that support it, but you have to go to SteamDB or similar to find them.
Well, duh. And PS5 or Series X isn't showing anything Apple Silicon couldn't do. They are all GPUs, they all do the same thing. Apple Silicon can simply do it at a lower power consumption.
There are two things conflated here. First, it is entirely up to the developer which binaries they ship (and e.g. Larian did ship ARM-native binaries long before "official" Steam support). The issue was integrating with Steam services as Valve did not offer native APIs until couple of months ago — stuff like friend discovery, achievements etc. One could still work around it using IPC but that would have been a huge hassle. But as @Nugat Trailers correctly points out, Steamworks has been updated with native Apple Silicon support couple of months ago, so there should not be any issues here.
Yes, there were universal binaries on Steam before September. I know that AI War 2 was universal in July., and a couple of other titles.
Larian was the more noteable example, since they had to do an Intel version through Steam, and if you wanted the ARM version, it had to be downloaded through their own server.
In general, I'd say that about... 26% of Macs on Steam would be using an M1, and another 5% using a M1 Pro/Max, going by the Steam hardware surveys. (8 core CPUs went from 4.51% in October 2020 to the current 33.45%, but December also has a few base M1 Pros inflating the number slightly. 10 core CPUs went from 0.23% in September 2021 to the current 3.83%.)
(2 core went from 51.17% in October 2020 to 29.87% now, and 4 core went from 35.97% to 25.67%)
Larian was the more noteable example, since they had to do an Intel version through Steam, and if you wanted the ARM version, it had to be downloaded through their own server.
In general, I'd say that about... 26% of Macs on Steam would be using an M1, and another 5% using a M1 Pro/Max, going by the Steam hardware surveys. (8 core CPUs went from 4.51% in October 2020 to the current 33.45%, but December also has a few base M1 Pros inflating the number slightly. 10 core CPUs went from 0.23% in September 2021 to the current 3.83%.)
(2 core went from 51.17% in October 2020 to 29.87% now, and 4 core went from 35.97% to 25.67%)
One could reasonably argue that Apple couldn’t reasonably run anything with realtime RT (which the consoles can). The easiest example of that would be Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, if it could be ran on a Mac the assumption should be that 4A Games would have ported it (since it is their new engine going forward, from my understanding). 🤷🏽♂️
But yeah otherwise there really hasn’t been anything else the consoles have shown that couldn’t run on a Mac.
Oddly enough Windows gained share in December (from Linux it appears), macOS didn’t change from it’s 2.7%.
The Mac's down slightly, but it usually covers around 2.5 to 4%. It's been dropping, likely due to people buying gaming PCs during the worst of the pandemic.
Linux is stronger than usual at over 1%. The wildcard is the Steam Deck though.
I believe 15% is for only smaller developers and larger more popular apps, apple gets 30%
The 16% one is 2021, there are 2 2022 charts one says 18% (first post) the second says 17%.
The question is different.
You can download the report here: https://reg.gdconf.com/state-of-game-industry-2022
That's great to hear! Do you know how we can sort for them? Even on SteamDB, it doesn't look like a title's page specifies whether it's available only for Intel Macs or if it's on Apple Silicon, too.
I'd heard about the API updates a few months ago, but I didn't know that they were the only part of the infrastructure stoping devs from uploading AS games! It's good news, but…
… it looks like most developers with AS versions of their games on iOS/iPadOS and the Mac App Store aren't updating them on Steam. Maybe that'll improve as AS machines become more common? I'm not sure.
Yes, if you go to Instant Search, and then Platform, then filter by macOS (Apple Silicon).
For an individual title, check in it's information to see if the osextended tag (it's located down past supported languages) has macosapplesilicon set.
Note that this is entirely opt-in, and I've seen titles that have native support even without having that tag. (Or even any tags, which results in the hilarious scenario where a ASi title has the 'This title may be incompatible with macOS Catalina or higher' message.)
Devs could upload AS games earlier without any problems, they would just need to jump though some hoops if they wanted to integrate with Steam services.
You are overestimating attention to detail of most devs
Most of these workflows appear to be much dumber than you think. There is a bunch of M1-native games on Steam that do not start because they are missing software dependencies. It seems that many devs simply have their "desktop" Unity project, click build and ship it off as it is. For newer Unity versions this will build both Intel and Apple Silicon code, but they apparently don't run any tests. So you end up with an Apple Silicon version that is nominally there but is utterly useless because third-party dependencies are Intel only. I run into this issue when trying to start 7 days to die: in the end one had to manually flag it to launch with Rosetta to work properly.iOS version are different because they are based on a different codebase and packaged/shipped differently. That's also also where your observation comes from.
I'd... both agree and disagree. If a game's been plopped out onto Steam, then a dev would probably just hit the magic 'PORT TO MAC' button, slam it on Steam.You are overestimating attention to detail of most devs
If a dev's taken time and attention to detail, then they probably would consider it and do one of the following:
a. Reject a Mac port. Maybe the game didn't do well. Maybe the dev team hates Tim Cook. Either way, won't happen.
b. Make a Mac port themselves. It could be customer demand. It could be an Apple engineer asking. Either way, the dev works on it and releases it.
c. Ask a third party to make a Mac port. Again, could be customer demand. Could be a porting company going "Hey, we did titles for you before, can we do this one?"
But if a dev releases a crap port, then that'll show in reviews. People'll see curators going "I BOUGHT THIS AND IT MAKES ET ON THE ATARI LOOK TRIPLE A!", and go "Yeah, not buying that."
...Or they'd buy it to see if it is actually that bad.
Oh, there is no doubt that folks who ship games on Mac do at least some amount of testing on Mac, otherwise they would not — as you say — release a Mac port. But it seems that they are still using Intel Macs to do the development, and don't really pay attention to the rest. The fact that binaries are shipped with included but non-functional ARM code segments make this very clear. If the dev would have tried to start the game on an M1 Mac they would immediately see a problem and at least disabled ARM codegen.
And then there are games like Pathfinder: Wrath of The Righteous, where you can an invisible inventory window that blocks your entire screen in the tutorial mission... which you'd think would be caught by testing department instantly (this is a huge issue that consistently occurs literally 3 minutes into the game). And yet it has been there for months with no fix on the horizon. Makes you wonder...
In the end I am convinced that the only way to get a good product if the devs themselves use it. If no dev at a game studio plays their own game on a Mac, the Mac version will usually suck. If no dev at a game studio plays their own game at all, the game will inevitably suck. Its not just games, its basic software as well.
While “macOS compatible” may technically be true, it might mean they’re compatible with Mojave - but no longer run on Catalina and later because there are no 64Bit binaries.
It’s frustrating, but for the devs if their game came out for Mojave, player numbers may not justify making the effort to offer a 64Bit version.
In theory. But if the underlying game's flawed, you can't exactly do much. Think of it like building a ship out of rotten timber. QA can check it, and say why it's bad, and plead with management, but that ship's going to launch.
All we can do is watch from the docks.