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OS X grabs 8% share on Steam

by Mike Schramm Jun 4th 2010 at 9:00PM

Valve has released the first Steam Hardware Survey since their Steam platform released for the Mac, and OS X has gained 8% of the market share already in its various iterations. Most of the Mac users are running 10.6.3, not surprising, given that those most likely to have the latest operating system are probably also the most likely to know that a Steam client is out and ready for them to download. Of course, the Mac faction still pales in comparison to the amount of Windows gamers on the network, but for a client that came out on the 12th day of the month for the survey data, 8% ain't bad at all.

Also of note: Intel processors in the survey jumped up by almost 3%, probably due to a lot of the new Mac users. And the 1280x800 primary desktop resolution also jumped as MacBook users installed and ran the new Mac Steam client. Average free hard drive space actually dropped a little bit (Mac users are busy people, after all...) and average network speed rose (...with fast Internet connections). The Steam Hardware Survey is always an interesting cross-section of what kind of PCs gamers are using, and a big injection of Macs into the numbers made for a fascinating set of data.

[via Ars]

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Valve has released the first Steam Hardware Survey since their Steam platform released for the Mac, and OS X has gained 8% of the market...
 

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jackbush316

Mac computer are so attractive to me. Macbook and iPhone almost the best choice for me about the laptop and smartphone.

iPhone Transfer for Mac Users.
http://www.iphonemactransfer.com

June 11 2010 at 11:11 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
iPad Weekly

The reality is that there just are not a lot of games which aren't available for the Mac. Developers are going to build games where there's enough potential customers to make a profit and often times, there's just not enough mac gamers to justify porting a game to the Mac. Sure, you can play some games by using Mac OSX, but you're missing out on a lot of good titles. There's nothing wrong with installing boot camp, and doing so allows you to have access to a much wider library of games.

June 06 2010 at 12:01 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ilkyone

Besides spamming every post with your inane comments, ipw, you don't seem to get it.

Who wants to install boot camp? The point of a mac for most people is to ignore such hassles and not having to go through a mess like that. Steam gets it by making a native app.

June 05 2010 at 11:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Johnny Thrash

Now if we could get a gaming company that has some decent games.

June 05 2010 at 9:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Korpil

Woohoo! I'm part of that 8%!!! I've installed Steam on both of my Macs and I still had an old Half-Life 2 license from when I suffered Windows.

So far I've spent around $30 dollars in Steam games. Guess the move was the right one!

June 05 2010 at 12:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Korpil's comment
jonas

Same here, been playing it since it was released on the Mac, I forgot how creepy it was! Runs like charm on my 2007 MBP!

June 06 2010 at 10:51 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
iPad Weekly

That's surprising given the relatively small number of games available on OSX and the overall market-share of the mac. You'd think Mac users would just install bootcamp.

iPad Weekly - http://www.ipadweek.ly/

June 05 2010 at 11:48 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Stetson

What's interesting are the users still using vanilla 10.6, having either disabled software updates or continued to close the nag window.

June 05 2010 at 2:54 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Stetson's comment
Stetson

On second thought, maybe those are hackintoshes?

June 05 2010 at 2:56 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Cougar

10.6.3 runs fine on hackintoshes.

June 05 2010 at 2:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
al

Awesome news. I can hardly wait until the mac users start forming online gaming factions and start challenging the windows fan boys to matches. Should make for some good yuks on both sides :D

June 05 2010 at 1:51 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
FightTheFuture

nice! mac users have a significant presence on steam. looks like valve made the right decision!

June 04 2010 at 11:26 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mike

10.5.8 is 64-bit? Or does that just refer to the 64-bit capability of the processor? Because I'm pretty darn sure that 10.5 was NEVER 64-bit.

June 04 2010 at 11:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Mike's comment
got nate?

While 10.5 WAS 64-bit, there were few to no 64-bit apps. Many of the under the hood tools were 64-bit though. 10.4 was also 64-bit, but there were no GUI libraries, so ONLY under the hood tools were 64-bit. The 64-bityniss of 10.6 is that the kernel is finally 64-bit (on mac pros and xserves) and all apple shipped GUI apps were also 64-bit.

June 04 2010 at 11:33 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Mike

Aha, thanks for the explanation. Makes sense now.

June 04 2010 at 11:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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