Mac OS accounts for only 5% of Steam use


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Valve’s published its latest Steam usage stats, showing that only 5.07 percent of the download service’s users are playing with Macs.

MacOS 10.6.3 64-bit accounted for 4.3 percent of total Steam use, with MacOS 10.5.8 64-bit adding the extra 0.77 percent.

Of those using Steam on Macs, a whopping 47 percent owned MacBook Pros. Nearly 54 percent of all Mac users packed 4Gb of RAM.

The Mac version of Steam launched in May, with Portal given away for free.

Windows XP 32-bit is still the most popular Steam OS at 32.73 percent of total use.

Second is Windows 7 64-bit at 28.24 percent, followed by Windows Vista 32-bit at 13.71 percent.

You can look at the entire stat page here.

VG247

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Only? I think 5% is pretty good.

Considering it's 1 out of 2 platforms it's available for, I'd say 5% is pretty terrible.

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Considering that the total OS X market share is somewhere between 5% and 10%, and that not all OS X users are gamers 5.07% share for OS X on Steam isn't all that bad.

Much better news (imho) is that XP is soon about to lose the #1 spot to Windows 7 x64.

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Considering it's 1 out of 2 platforms it's available for, I'd say 5% is pretty terrible.

Considering Mac OS X's marketshare is around 5%, I'd say 5% is completely logical.

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Considering it's 1 out of 2 platforms it's available for, I'd say 5% is pretty terrible.

Are you serious lol? Mac OSX has FAR less marketshare than windows. 5% is pretty good.

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not surprising. they've added some new stats to teh survey it seems, i was surprised to find teamspeak had more share than ventrilo. or that there are people with MS frontpage installed. XD

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Considering Mac OS X's marketshare is around 5%, I'd say 5% is completely logical.

Yes, it's completely logical. What's illogical is the surprise that some people show about this.

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This comment sums it up pretty well:

I actually think that?s an okay number considering: one, how few games are Mac compatible compared to PC; two, what the Mac-to-PC market share ratio is; and three, how only just recently Steam has become available for the Mac.

http://www.vg247.com/2010/08/25/mac-os-accounts-for-only-5-of-steam-use/comment-page-1/#comment-208134

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Considering that the total OS X market share is somewhere between 5% and 10%, and that not all OS X users are gamers 5.07% share for OS X on Steam isn't all that bad.

Much better news (imho) is that XP is soon about to lose the #1 spot to Windows 7 x64.

if any thing that will encourage devs to compile for 64 :D

give it till dec 2010

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It doesn't matter what OS X's market share is, 5% is still only 5%, which does not seem worth the effort when the big customers (i.e. those who spend lots on games) will already have installed Windows or have a gaming PC as well as their Mac.

Of those 5%, how many actually bought games and didn't just download portal for free? Probably not a lot.

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It doesn't matter what OS X's market share is, 5% is still only 5%

Your argument doesn't make any sense. Do you somehow expect the percentage of Mac users using Steam to somehow be greatly larger than the marketshare of Macs vs. Windows PCs? Why would you expect it to be larger? This just goes to show that roughly the same proportion of people on each platform play games.

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Considering it's 1 out of 2 platforms it's available for, I'd say 5% is pretty terrible.

How so? Look at the market share, it's a lot lower than Windows.

I have 2 Macs in my house (not including my hack that's in the closet lol) and I didn't try steam (and don't plan to). I don't really play games, the only computer game I usually play is the Heroes of Might and Magic series and Civilization series

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People are missing my point: I'm not saying that Mac SHOULD have more than 5%, simply that it seems like a terrible waste of resources from Steam. I'm sure that porting and maintaining Steam for Mac OS takes more than 5% of their resources, especially given that the 5% is probably inflated already because of the free portal offer.

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People are missing my point: I'm not saying that Mac SHOULD have more than 5%, simply that it seems like a terrible waste of resources from Steam. I'm sure that porting and maintaining Steam for Mac OS takes more than 5% of their resources, especially given that the 5% is probably inflated already because of the free portal offer.

That's a pretty backwards way of looking at it. They aren't consuming 100% of your resources anyway, so trying to say that the 5% of Mac users use 5+% of resources makes no sense.

Considering that damn near 100% of Mac users are using Steam is a pretty huge success, imo.

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People are missing my point: I'm not saying that Mac SHOULD have more than 5%, simply that it seems like a terrible waste of resources from Steam.

By your logic then, no one would make any software at all for the Mac or Linux, yet they do. So long as there is a profit to be made, developers will cater to any OS that they can support.

Considering that damn near 100% of Mac users are using Steam is a pretty huge success, imo.

Saying that 5% of Steam users are on the Mac (and relating that to the approximate 5% market share of the Mac in general) does not in any way imply that 100% of Mac users are using Steam. For that to be true, it would also have to be true that nearly 100% of Windows users were using Steam as well.

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Considering that damn near 100% of Mac users are using Steam is a pretty huge success, imo.

if that were true steam would see higher than 5% mac users. steam hardware survey is a large sample size, but it's still just representative of the bigger picture like any other survey. and there's no accounting for how many mac users also took the survey while dual booted into windows, or if that' dealt with by the survey taking methodology.

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People are missing my point: I'm not saying that Mac SHOULD have more than 5%, simply that it seems like a terrible waste of resources from Steam. I'm sure that porting and maintaining Steam for Mac OS takes more than 5% of their resources, especially given that the 5% is probably inflated already because of the free portal offer.

I think they believe MacOS will thrive even more in the future and they want to bank on it (imagine if the platform was to take off amongst gamers and Steam is the only online distribution mode available).

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5+% is a small number, they are just shy of Vista 64bit users, but it is still an additional 5+% of sales or distributions.

As +Rudy pointed out, this is huge in the long haul for steam as they will become the de-facto standard distribution method for gaming on the mac platform, and good for them! To think 5+% added revenue is bad, is ludicrous, not to mention they can now hopefully (and I believe it was mentioned) in the future add linux support as well.

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5+% is a small number, they are just shy of Vista 64bit users, but it is still an additional 5+% of sales or distributions.

As +Rudy pointed out, this is huge in the long haul for steam as they will become the de-facto standard distribution method for gaming on the mac platform, and good for them! To think 5+% added revenue is bad, is ludicrous, not to mention they can now hopefully (and I believe it was mentioned) in the future add linux support as well.

It won't be anywhere even near an extra 5% revenue. There are not enough games available for Mac yet (and I'm doubtful that there will be any time soon), and I suspect that a lot of the people who buy games from Steam for Mac were already buying them and playing on Windows.

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It doesn't matter what OS X's market share is, 5% is still only 5%, which does not seem worth the effort when the big customers (i.e. those who spend lots on games) will already have installed Windows or have a gaming PC as well as their Mac.

Of those 5%, how many actually bought games and didn't just download portal for free? Probably not a lot.

Mac support was just released this year, so it's hardly a fair statistic at all. Maybe it'd be a better statistic if we compared the number of Mac users today with the number of PC users at the same point in Steam's life cycle for PC games (read: the first year of release for Steam on PC). Even still, that statistic wouldn't be fair because Steam has advanced to a much bigger service than it was in the first year of its release.

Basically, my point is this: this really is a useless statistic. It's impossible to fairly compare given that Steam was just released for the Mac and that Windows users have had years to build their userbase for Steam. It's an interesting statistic, but useless at the moment. Honestly, it's higher than I thought it would be.

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The number makes sense to me, the OS X port is pretty new, most users were accumulated during the period where it was Windows only, there isn't a wide selection of games for OS X and Mac's are currently pretty low powered in the graphics department (and the drivers are terrible)

Give it time, and the number will grow.

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