Steam Hardware Survey Shows Surprising Number of OS X Gamers
It's often difficult to work out just how much market share various platforms and applications actually have. One method is to count the number of hits coming from various platforms to popular services. Valve's Steam Hardware Survey has always been a fairly interesting cross section of the sort of systems people are using for gaming, from the very top of the line systems to what would pass as an average gaming system. Like a lot of surveys, it is based off voluntary input from users, so there is always some caution urged with the results.
What is interesting to note from the most recent hardware survey (May 2010), is that Mac OS X versions make up almost 8.5% of systems reporting for OS version in use. This is quite a surprising and revealing statistic. It has been less than a month since Steam for OS X has been released, and in that timeframe, market share has already risen to almost 8.5%.
For a platform that has drawn the ire of gamers for its apparent non-gamer friendly list of available titles and late ports, to have such a large percentage so quickly on Steam shows that the hidden reality of OS X gamers may be larger than many people gave credence to. With Steam's service not seemingly directed at the casual gamer (despite the many casual games available on the service), there is a fairly hidden segment of gamers who have been silently waiting for the ability to game natively on their systems.
With other alternatives for OS X gamers including VMWare, Parallels, Wine, Crossover, Crossover Games, Cider ports, Bootcamp, and a fairly healthy porting scene, there are an ever increasing list of options for gamers who don't want to boot out of OS X in order to get their gaming fix.
Perhaps the OS X market share is heading towards the point where more game developers will target the platform, if not necessarily for simultaneous release, perhaps still for a native release at a later stage.
6 June 2010
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