apple could give some stats to show how many Mac users bought a game, to show devs there's an audience for games on Mac. "too many secrets"
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In 3 years, 50% of all computers capable of playing AAA games will be Macs
- Thread starter senttoschool
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I was pretty clearly talking about the Steam user base in that two sentence paragraph.
Fair enough, I interpreted your comment:
Steam Deck is almost 1% of the Steam user base. That's pretty crazy for a single model of computer. It's more than all the Apple M1 models combined (including Pro & Max models).
as saying Steam Deck outsold the Apple M1. If you are comparing user bases, MacOS users outnumber SteamDeck users on Steam, but probably are split amongst various Mac models so Steam Deck may be more then M1 Macs. Not sure why that matters, since both are an insignificant part of Steam's business.
Apple has never seemed to be serious about Mac gaming, they're much more focused on mobile games, IMHO. Part of the problem may be, unless a game mirrors the PC version exactly but has an Apple interface, Mac gamers will pan it.
I also suspect it's hard enough to make money with PC games, so investing time and resources in Mac games makes no fiscal sense.
I made a whole post in a different thread about how Apple should show concurrent/active users for games (or at least track it internally), as it is a decent enough metric to track how a game is doing in it's lifecycle. Sales data may be useful for single player games, but games with a bunch of folks playing really depends on concurrent/active user count.
The issue I have with that is privacy, Apple should not get my data if I am playing a game, unless it runs on their servers. Apple's problem is thy really have no way to get good data, since the games are often not sold by them or run on Apple hardware if multiplayer; outside of voluntary user disclosure of such data. Good numbers are hard to get unless the game developers supply it. The best is probably Steam's and a 2% user base is not very enticing economically.
That is the plus (and minus) of gaming via Steam (I assume EGS is the same). The other downside is perception that having that data can cause, Ubisoft is crapped on often so lets use them as an example. Generally speaking the games they publish do okay. Like folks think AC:Shadows was a flop compared to AC:Valhalla, but when looking at the available Steam stats, they appear about the same.
Which is not the same as booting and running a Linux Distro off a USB drive. Plug and Play specifically refers to the ability to connect and use peripherals and devices without needing to configure jumpers on the motherboard or device or even manually installing drivers and/or software.