Latest Steam hardware survey
Saturday, June 5, 2010 | Permalink
I've touched on the Steam hardware survey a couple of time before, mostly related to JC2. This month's survey has another very interesting piece of data. Steam has only been available for Mac less than a month, yet MacOS now represents 8.46% of the market. That's an enormous accomplishment for the Steam system to bring on so many Mac users in so short time! The number of Mac users vs. PC users are already pretty much in balance with current Mac vs. PC market in general. My next wish is for Valve to expand the system to Linux as well. I don't think a lot of AAA titles would come to Linux anytime soon, but a lot of indie developers would love to explore that market. It may not be large enough to be worth the effort for AAA titles, but for indie games it would certainly be. As someone once explained, being a big fish in a small pond is not so bad.
It's also worth noting that Windows XP keeps dropping. The drop looks a bit unproportional because MacOS jumped in and stole 8.46% of the market, making all Windows versions drop their percentage, but the XP drop is large while other versions have modest drops. If we look at the Windows world only, XP now represents 36.5%, with Windows 7 beating it at 39.2% and Vista at 23.6%.
