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This makes no sense to me. Apple does nothing to prevent AAA games on the App Store also being released on Steam. I think it’s more likely that the GPTK license is to encourage developers to make high quality native ports rather than devs checking a box to make their game available on Mac.


For whatever reason Steam just doesn't seem very popular with Mac users.

In the latest Hardware survey Mac users were outnumbered by Linux users by 50%.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...


It's because Apple told Steam users to fuck off like 3 times in 5 years (nuking 32-bit support; no Vulkan/OpenGL support; switching to ARM). Users and game devs got the message Apple was sending loud & clear.


32-bit is the only change that actually broke anything, and it had been deprecated for a decade.

64-bit OpenGL/x86 games work fine on ARM.


Will x86 games work in 2 years? Will OpenGL? What about in 3 years? 5? Then what happens to Valve's Apple owning customers purchases?


Apple killed support for legacy 32-bit applications a good while back, which killed support for virtually every Mac game port.


The funny thing is most games in my library say they won't run on macOS because they're 32-bit applications, and they won't show up in my library when filtering by "Mac". But they all run perfectly fine, so they're obviously 64-bit. I think I heard once that they all default to 32-bit unless the developer says otherwise...


I'm sure it doesn't make a big difference but the issue with this is it doesn't count Mac users using CrossOver/Whisky because they get detected as Windows users, while Linux users with Proton are reported as using Linux.


From what I’ve seen, for some reason, the people who buy a Mac are not the people who game. College students buying for schoolwork, business people buying for (I assume?) excellent battery life and resulting portability, and graphics/video/music creators. The two Venn circles just don’t overlap.


I play games on my Mac, but I don't use Steam. I just play World of Warcraft which is a native Apple Silicon game, and a few other games that don't require Steam.




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