But this hasn’t really stopped developers from making their games compatible. Of the almost 132,000 games on Steam, 23,000 are playable on Mac, which is a lot. More importantly, developers are releasing big titles with support for the platform, and Apple’s market share for personal computing devices shipments is currently fourth in the world at 9.1 per cent, according to a report by market intelligence firm International Data Corporation.
“I think there’s huge potential in Mac support, and we’ve seen games sell in the general range of 3 to 5 per cent of their copies on Mac frequently, so it’s a very solid amount of players,” said Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse.
Hooded Horse, a publisher of indie strategy games, does encourage its development studios to add support, although it leaves it up to developers to decide.
“Honestly, we want to meet gamers where they are, so if we can support a user’s system of preference, that’s always a great thing. It feels like the number of players on Mac does sometimes surprise people.”
A SINGLE MACHINE
For some gamers who use PC to game and MacBooks for work, the recent release of games on Mac is exciting because of the ability to game anywhere without having to carry around heavy gaming laptops.
“I used to play games on a Windows laptop, but compared with the M4 MacBook Air, which can run Cyberpunk 2077, but with the same price, we can’t get any Windows laptop to run at the same settings,” said Vin.
He also pointed out that while the game is better optimised for Mac, there are games that are not yet available or optimised for the platform, and conceding that a Windows machine does provide more options.
While Vin’s been very happy with the progress Apple is making to get games into Mac, he reckoned they could do more to improve the experience, such as Game Mode, which he feels doesn’t really do anything to improve the performance of games when it’s turned on.
