Steam releases Mac stats, share drops to 5%

Steam has released its latest hardware survey results, and there's both good and bad news for us Mac gamers. The bad news first: Mac usage of the gaming service has apparently leveled off since the big debut a few months ago, and while the Mac share was originally around 8%, it appears the novelty has worn off a bit, and Mac usage has fallen down to about 5% of the total Steam audience. That's not too surprising (don't forget that the service kicked off with a free Portal game and a good amount of publicity), and it's important to remember that 5% of Steam's 25 million users is still a significant audience. It'll be interesting to see if Apple ever takes advantage of that -- we haven't heard a single official word from them yet about Steam coming to our platform, although the Snow Leopard Graphics Update was tuned to clear up issues that Valve reported.

The good news, however, is that Valve has separated out Windows and Mac stats in the hardware survey, so even though there are a few less percentage points of people to look at, we have a lot of interesting information about those Mac users. As you can see in the graphic above, the majority of them are actually playing on a MacBook Pro -- iMacs are the next biggest model on the list, but represent 25% of Mac users as opposed to the MBP's 49%.

Steam is also promising a list of most commonly installed Mac applications, but as of this writing, that information isn't posted quite yet. Unfortunately, while Steam is installed on a wide variety of Windows computers, I'll bet that it hasn't quite reached widespread adoption on the Mac side, so these stats will be specifically for Mac gamers rather than the Mac audience as a whole. But it's always interesting to see what stats come out of the Steam Hardware Survey, as a snapshot of just what our technology profile looks like.

[via Joystiq]
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