Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening Because There Aren't Enough Players on Mac To Justify It (macrumors.com)
- Reference: 0171989779
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/23/10/10/1641209/valve-says-counter-strike-2-for-macos-not-happening-because-there-arent-enough-players-on-mac-to-justify-it
- Source link: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/10/valve-confirms-counter-strike-2-no-macos/
> Valve confirmed its decision and gave its reasons in a newly published Steam support FAQ: "As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS. Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players. Moving forward, Counter-Strike 2 will exclusively support 64-bit Windows and Linux."
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/10/valve-confirms-counter-strike-2-no-macos/
MacOS gaming is kinda of catch-22 (Score:4, Informative)
There are no games on MacOS so one one plays them. No one plays them because they are not there.
The only way gaming will ever be a thing on MacOS is for Apple to invest in it, just like they did for the iOS App store. Someone has to go first, and then second, etc. Apple will have to fund that at a loss until its big enough to sustain itself. That means incentivizing game companies.
There were plenty of games on MacOS (Score:4, Informative)
they don't sell all that well. But I've been gaming on PC one way or another since 1998 or so (1996 if you count scavenged 286 and 386s and really old DOS games). Go back that far and there were plenty of Mac games. Sales kept dropping for all but the biggest titles, so that's all we got. Even then the weak support for GPUs on most Macs made 3d games a hard sell.
The problem is it's a niche inside a niche. You have "Mac gamer who has a desecrate GPU Mac & who won't just go buy a gaming laptop or PC". There just aren't a lot of those. The move away from Intel was just the final nail in that coffin.
Re:There were plenty of games on MacOS (Score:4, Interesting)
When it comes to gaming, the bang for your buck that you get out of Mac hardware is terrible. I still remember trying to run Descent on one of those old garishly-colored CRT iMacs back in the day, and it was damn near unplayable. The same amount of money spent in PC hardware would get you buttery smooth gameplay.
They used to say on Usenet that if you wanted to game and exclusively own only Mac computers, buy a PlayStation. Some things never change.
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I wrote a few games on the PC between 1987-1988. The sound processor in Mac at the time rocked, compared to a PC speaker whose tone was a function of turning it off and on based on system clock and a divider. At the time, gaming on the PC was an afterthought. Then in 1987 PS/2 came with VGA, but still no sound processor. It wasn't until 1989 when Create Technologies created Sound Blaster when gaming took off on the PC. And then Doom took the world by storm because of its LAN play option. That's when Ma
Re: MacOS gaming is kinda of catch-22 (Score:2)
I had an awesome multiplayer game of Baldurâ(TM)s Gate 3 last night - on my M2 Mac. If Larian can do it, why not others?
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It's not that they can't do it, it's that they can't make much money from doing it. Macs are niche and kinda pointless compared to the rest of the world.
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> Macs are niche and kinda pointless
Apple sells over 26 millions macs a year and the number gets bigger every year. Hardly niche and hardly pointless.
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OK, you keep telling yourself that. I'll just sit here and enjoy my stuff on Linux and Windows while you try to convince us that 26 million is anything but a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the world.
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I'm thinking you don't have a good grasp on language or math.
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Ha! I do have both! In 2022, approximately 286 million PCs were shipped around the world, a decline of 16.2 percent, with the economic uncertainty observed around the world cited as factor leading to this fall. 26 million is not even 10%, so maybe math done be hard fer ya?
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Although formatting is difficult for me today...
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Apple is the 4th largest computer manufacturer in the world. I'm not sure what you're thinking...
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So? 4th largest is like "smartest tard in the room", not much to be proud of...
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But they didn't buy counter strike. So they are not a target market for the follow up.
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> Apple sells over 26 millions macs a year and the number gets bigger every year. Hardly niche and hardly pointless.
Considering that you have to own one if you intend to develop for iOS, that's probably a good chunk of that market. That's basically what Macs are these days - a software development platform for the products they're actually trying to sell.
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Have you not left your house much in the past 5+ years?
Saying most of their revenue comes from developers of their platform is... silly. Seriously. It demonstrates very little understanding of how money works.
Apple is the 4th largest manufacturer of computers in the world. If you're considering laptops only, that's probably closer to #2. They have increasing business penetration, and many people have gone to them 100% from previously being PC types.
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> Have you not left your house much in the past 5+ years?
Even the Apple Store keeps all their Mac products in the back corner of the store. Aside from places that sell the machines, the only time I've seen a consumer-facing business actually using a Mac over the last few years was when I went to test drive a Tesla. And at least from what I experienced (they used it for playing an introductory video before letting you drive the car), a iPad could've served the same purpose.
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Windows PC sales may be declining, but they still shipped *285 million* last year. When you're 1/10 the size, yes, you're niche and yes, you're pointless to anybody wanting to sell to a mass market (which AAA game publishers want to do).
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> Windows PC sales may be declining, but they still shipped *285 million* last year. When you're 1/10 the size, yes, you're niche and yes, you're pointless to anybody wanting to sell to a mass market (which AAA game publishers want to do).
285 million of mostly office PC's which can't play these games. So gaming companies should just close shop right? Pointless I guess.
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It's not the sales numbers, it's the number of Mac users who do gaming at all. Valve is in a very good position to know that.
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> Apple sells over 26 millions macs a year and the number gets bigger every year. Hardly niche and hardly pointless.
And just about 0.1% of those are capable as gaming PCs. Discrete graphics sucks donkey dick compared to a dedicated GPU.
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> Discrete graphics sucks
I meant integrated. That's what I get trying to work and play at the same time.
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There are some surprisingly competent integrated GPU's out there. AMD has some RDNA3 ones that really aren't bad. Same with Apple's.
They're not a Nvidia 4070 but they're definitely fine for what they are.
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It means compared to all the other machines sold in the world. So it's definitely a niche platform that just wastes peoples time dealing with apple's self-inflicted incompatibilities.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> Apple will have to fund that at a loss until its big enough to sustain itself. That means incentivizing game companies.
They'd also have to invest in hardware. Keep in mind, no modern Apple Silicon Mac has a discrete GPU. Instead, they have an integrated GPU that's based on the iPhone's mobile GPU, and they use a custom Apple API to program them.
So, ultimately you have:
1. Macs require a CPU architecture that most non-mobile games do not target
2. Macs use an API that no one else uses
3. Macs use mobile-grade GPUs, no matter how much Apple wants to pretend "console grade" means anything else
Which means that, unless you're makin
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> 3. Macs use mobile-grade GPUs, no matter how much Apple wants to pretend "console grade" means anything else
That just isn't accurate. Apple silicon is able to compete with low to mid tier dedicated laptop GPUs. In terms of hardware, games are more than capable of running ok. The problem is that if gaming is your goal, its a lot cheaper to go with a gaming laptop. As such, gamers still aren't likely to go Mac.
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If gaming is your goal, you build yourself a gaming desktop PC, which no Mac in existence can equal in gaming performance, at any price point.
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You probably should better define 'gaming', not all of us are into FPSers, and my 4X games run just fine on Mac thank you very much.
Another option, if you have solid un-capped Internet, I've found services like [1]Shadow [shadow.tech] far more cost effective than building a dedicated gaming rig and keeping it current. This is very location and ISP dependent though. I've flirted with trying to duplicate the functionality in Azure, on paper it's possible and Microsoft has way better peering arrangements, but I just don't g
[1] https://shadow.tech/
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It's really not, though. You can't get comparable performance from PCs for the $600 of a Mac mini. The biggest issue, is compatibility.
It used to be that Apple folks just ran games in virtualization (or dual booted). Apple Silicon makes that significantly more cumbersome but it's still doable.
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> But beyond that, as long as Apple hardware is actively hostile to games, I don't see it ever becoming a "real" gaming platform. Apple hasn't shown they intend to ever really address the real problems that exist on their hardware.
They probably don't want it to be viewed as a serious gaming machine because they think it will tarnish the brand. That is probably why they don't allow you to put a real GPU in the new systems and there is no real API developed for gaming.
This is a completely different business model than Microsoft. Many years ago Microsoft recognized that people bought PC for gaming and actively encouraged it with the release of Directx and all its decadents. Basically not since the Amiga has no other platform bee
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This is Wintel troll nonsense. None of it is accurate.
Apple Silicon M1 and M2 are not 'based on the iPhone'.
The GPU is not discreet, the GPU effectively IS the CPU, with direct system memory access. It's exceedingly fast. It blows away even the mid-tier desktop offerings from AMD and nVidia in performance for eg. OpenCL. There are accounts of people running games on their M1/M2 machines, emulated, and they run better than on high end gaming systems. Planetary Annihilation is one specific example I'm aware o
Like Apple M1, Nintendo Switch uses AArch64 (Score:2)
> Macs require a CPU architecture that most non-mobile games do not target
Do you count games for Nintendo Switch as "mobile games" for this purpose?
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If Apple were to do this, they'd effectively enter a war with Microsoft.
Windows gaming is, I'd suspect, the biggest thing keeping anyone buying Windows machines for home use.
Though, I suspect that the demographic is wrong. Apple users are not typically gamers: they're older, more affluent and likely more career focused individuals.
I've personally not been able to game for years due to a lack of platform support. I'll use nVidia NOW for single player games, but there are few options for multiplayer. That's s
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> Windows gaming is, I'd suspect, the biggest thing keeping anyone buying Windows machines for home use.
Nearly no one buys Windows unless its bundled on a machine, and it's the affordability of that machine relative to Macs that is by far the number one reason for buying Windows. Some other reasons are avoiding the Apple walled garden (unless one starts off with all family members and devices already in the walled garden), familiarity with Windows, and also the availability of some apps on Windows but not Macs ... like games.
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> Nearly no one buys Windows unless its bundled on a machine
And absolutely no one buys a MacOS unless it is bundled on a Mac.
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Yeah, well it's not like the gaming industry shoulders the blame on that one. Jobs made it clear he was not a fan of gaming and did nothing to make Apple OSes a welcome place for them.
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in 2014 it was 86% pc and grew linux eventually overtook mac at 5% and mac gpu are garbage that need tons of optimization = expensive. just not worth it
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No games on MacOS? I have over 100 games playable on MacOS in my steam account and I didn't even buy them for that reason.. I keep hearing people say things like that. It's not 2006 anymore..
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A Mac with a decent GPU is crazy expensive. I have a PC for gaming.
Good (Score:1, Troll)
Teaching first year CS, I have pucked up a real dislike of Apple. They hide stuff from the user even more than Windows does. Mac users have even less idea what a file, or a directory is. Things just magically work, until they don't, and then things really suck. Heck, they don't even put special characters like [ ] on the keyboard.
Missing games? One step in getting people away from Apple.
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> Heck, they don't even put special characters like [ ] on the keyboard.
It seems pretty obvious you have no idea what you're talking about. This could have been proven wrong in about 20 seconds, had you bothered.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Apple-K... [amazon.com]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Keyboard-Numeric-Wireless-Rechargable/dp/B071ZZTNBM/
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They don't even have a backspace key, or a Windows key. Trash.
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I heard control-Alt-delete doesn't work on a Mac, too! How do they reboot??
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Gotta unplug it I guess
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> I heard control-Alt-delete doesn't work on a Mac, too! How do they reboot??
We just trade in our old Mac and buy a new one, in that situation.
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> How do they reboot??
You kick it with an actual boot, all the way back to the Apple store. Then you buy a new one.
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-- You kick it with an actual boot, all the way back to the Apple store. Then you buy a new one.
I wish I had mod points. This gave me a good laugh
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Apple had an Apple key ( Open Apple and Closed Apple on the Apple //e, and Command key on Macs) before Microsoft copied them.
But yeah the lack of backspace is annoying.
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> But yeah the lack of backspace is annoying.
The "delete" on the Mac keyboard is the functional equivalent of the backspace key on a Windows machine.
Are you lamenting the missing Windows-style "del" key which provides forward delete functionality? This is available on a Mac laptop with fn-modified delete, but is also available as a standalone key on Mac keyboards with a numeric keypad.
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windows users (and linux users as well these days) have always loved bashing the mac... they love it so much that they don't even rely upon the very real ways they could but, instead make shite up about macs. they seem to think that their bashing is acceptable, but when you point out a lie (as you just did) then they label you 'fanboy' and are derisive of you.
Best to just keep your head down and let them crap in their hands and throw it around their cages.
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>> Heck, they don't even put special characters like [ ] on the keyboard.
> It seems pretty obvious you have no idea what you're talking about. This could have been proven wrong in about 20 seconds, had you bothered.
> [1]https://www.amazon.com/Apple-K... [amazon.com]
He is most likely talking about a keyboard with this layout:
[2]https://www.amazon.com/Apple-M... [amazon.com]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Keyboard-Numeric-Wireless-Rechargable/dp/B071ZZTNBM/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Magic-Keyboard-Swiss-Silver/dp/B09BRD7B7T
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Given the domain they have on their profile uses the TLD for Switzerland, I would venture you're correct.
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It's interesting that, of the nine region-specific compact Apple keyboards available on that Amazon page, seven do have the square brackets - even the Chinese one. But the Danish and Swiss variants do not.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Square brackets look like theyâ(TM)re problematic on a Windows Swiss-German keyboard too. Iâ(TM)d bet theyâ(TM)re available on the Apple keyboard by chording with the option key or something like that. Maybe the PC one is also similar? Apple keyboards tend to be much easier than PC to access other characters, for example e-acute on an English keyboard is Option-e, e. I seem to remember alt+numeric keypad magic number on Windows.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Example:
[1]https://kbdlayout.info/KBDSG/ [kbdlayout.info]
[1] https://kbdlayout.info/KBDSG/
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
> they don't even put special characters like [ ] on the keyboard.
WTF are you talking about? I am literally looking at my Apple keyboard right now and all the same characters that exist on a PC are there including [ and ]. Stop lying.
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> Heck, they don't even put special characters like [ ] on the keyboard.
[1]I can see them, though. [apple.com]
[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMMR3LL/A/magic-keyboard-with-touch-id-and-numeric-keypad-for-mac-models-with-apple-silicon-us-english-black-keys
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this is nonsense and not at all insightful. Apple Keyboards have [ and ] and always have. The OG Apple 2 was styized as Apple ][.
it's just silly to say that apple users dont know what a file or a folder is. macos has done quite a bit less than Windows has in trying to obfusciate those things. Finder still takes you to a view of folders and files and the file picker does the same, unlike most microsoft apps that only give you recents and make you hunt for files in folders/directories.
If anything, Apple m
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> Heck, they don't even put special characters like [ ] on the keyboard.
What keyboard are you looking at? Genuinely curious. Because I have a MacBook Pro and one of Apple's wireless keyboards in front of me at the moment, and they both have the brackets, as well as all of the other standard US symbols, and that's been true of every Apple-designed keyboard I've seen or used for the last few decades, so I'm not sure what you're using. Even their iPad keyboards have them.
Just for your reference, after skipping the F-key row, here's what's on each row of both the keyboards I have i
Re: Good (Score:2)
The 90s called. They want their rivalry back.
Fantastic. (Score:2)
Another overpriced game that I now have no temptation to play. I might get something done at last.
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There's something very strange about someone with an overpriced computer complaining that a free-to-play game is overpriced.
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Sour grapes are expensive.
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> Sour grapes are expensive.
The flipside to that, though, is that sometimes more money spent on something really does not provide a superior user experience. Pirated movies don't show previews or make you sit through a bunch of other unskippable shit. I can adjust the climate control in my el cheapo econobox without taking my eyes off the road because it has physical controls.
...and my homebuilt gaming PC which cost a fraction of a Mac with comparable storage and RAM specs probably will run CS2 just fine.
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so, free to play? then how does the coder get paid for creating and supporting it? via that in game purchase feature? As in, in order to have anything like real toys to be competitive with, you have to pay real money?
They want you to buy a Steam Deck (Score:2)
And to be honest, I don't blame them. If you can afford Apple's prices, you can certainly afford a Steam Deck to get your gaming fix.
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My daughter has a Steam Deck - it looks very cool. Being able to get at the Linux underneath makes it even more so. If I played more games, I'd probably buy one.
That said, odds are this game will be supported in CrossOver (Wine) on Mac soon enough. The Codeweavers folks do good work.
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Steam Deck has a lot more software on it that I want to use.
The ARM transition is a failure. (Score:2)
This is going to be controversial, but the whole reason why Apple Macs got popular after almost going bankrupt in the 90s was the fact that they switched to Intel and had Bootcamp. People could have the "cool" computer, yet also be able to use Windows and Linux for their real work. Emulation just isn't good enough when performance matters with games. Apple has to make some difficult choices. Either license x86 at the hardware level (not done since VIA), add hardware emulation Transmeta style (remember them?
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I don't think it's controversial. I think it's the truth. It is widely regarded that Apples switch away from Intel was a mistake. This caused developers to have to retool and develop a separate branch of software to support two processor architectures at a cost of millions. To most developers it simply wasn't worth the cost. Adobe was going to dump the new Mac line until Apple offered to subsidies to develop for the new line.
An that is not a bad thing. It's been common practice for companies to pay
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Having CS on a mac still possible not cause value might make it but due to last part of the statement. "Moving forward, Counter-Strike 2 will exclusively support 64-bit Windows and Linux. " The linux part might be way it could be on there.
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> It is widely regarded that Apples switch away from Intel was a mistake.
Widely regarded by whom? I have both Intel and Apple Silicon machines in my fleet. The latter generate less tickets than the former. You can attribute some but not all of that to age. The Apple Silicon chips are more powerful, consume less energy, generate less heat, and in my experience result in a better end user experience. Application compatibility was a PITA if you jumped into it on the bleeding edge but is mostly a nothingburger these days.
> Adobe was going to dump the new Mac line until Apple offered to subsidies to develop for the new line.
You got a citation for this claim? Adobe had a publishe
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Nope and I'm not going to provide you with any. I'm not going to waste what time I have digging through the internet trying to find a reference to a obscure article I read years ago. You can ether find it yourself or go ahead and make a big deal out of nothing. Truth is many companies do pay development costs when launching a new platform. It's not that big of a deal. If you make it one, go for it.
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I wonder what percentage of users bought Windows and installed it via Boot Camp? Was it really enough for that to be the reason hardware sales were so good? If anything, units shipped seemed to increase with the move to the M-series.
Did Steam for Mac suddenly stop being profitable? (Score:1)
This is just such a very weird statement from a company that sells so many games for macOS.
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Steam makes money mostly by selling other people's games, not Valve's games.
On the Mac, Steam makes money on every game sale, as long as Valve doesn't have to pay to develop the game. If Valve is the developer, they need a lot of sales to make a profit (pay back the development/marketing costs). So Steam can make money for them on Mac, as long as they don't sink a lot of money into developing the games and just take their 30% off the top.
In other words, it doesn't hurt Valve if other companies develop games
It's Been Weird (Score:2)
It's been a weird ride watching Linux overtake Macs in gaming. While Macs were never really known for first-class gaming experiences, let's not forget that they did have some wildly successful exclusive titles such as Marathon. I think the transition to x86 hurt gaming within OS X a bit since you could just boot into Windows and get access to a much wider selection of games. Therefore, even fewer people bought titles written for OS X. Now that Apple shifted away from x86 and game titles on OS X are virt
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> It's been a weird ride watching Linux overtake Macs in gaming.
Year of the Linux Games PC happened before Year Of The Linux Desktop; weird is an understatement.
Bring back CS:GO (Score:1)
Valve are annoying. CS:GO worked perfectly on MacOS. I don't understand why Valve replaced CS:GO with CS2! They could have left CS:GO for all those who don't like CS2 & Mac Users. Now one less game that works on MacOS
Question I am too lazy to look up (Score:3)
Is CS2 Linux native, or a really good job by Proton with the Windows EXE?
Re: Question I am too lazy to look up (Score:5, Informative)
Native.
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Cheers. That's an encouraging sign for Steam Deck owners.