Windows 8 Thunders Past Mac OS X on Steam

What an odd metric to cherry-pick. How much of Steam's catalog is even on Mac OS X?<p>There is no need to look at Steam statistics to feel good about Windows 8. Even if Windows 8 is a colossal failure it will still have over 100 million users within a year, more than enough to keep it ahead of Mac OS X.

I'm not sure if "Thunders" is the correct term here. It has roughly 44% more usage, which could be significant if Mac OS X didn't have less than 4% total usage.<p>I imagine that when Valve releases Steam for Linux, there will be headlines like "Linux rapidly encroaching on Mac OS X's usage share on Steam" when it hits like 1-2% total usage.<p>Of course Windows 8 is going to overtake Mac OS X, there are simply more gamers on Windows, and gamers tend to use the latest software, regardless of how terrible it is.

This is misleading. Windows 8 has just passed 10.7.4. There are 3 more recent Mac Versions that have a higher install base than Windows 8. Hell even Windows XP has more Users than Windows 8.

People focus too much on percentages of installed users. Better to look at the <i>total</i> user count (and compare that to the engineering cost of supporting the platform). It doesn't matter if OS X has 3% or even 0.1% of users. If the number of addressable customers is high enough, then it can be worth it to support that platform.

[unrelated] just noticed this on the source site under 'primary display resolution':<p>6048 x 1080 [0.01% | +0.00%]<p>..where does this exist?

source: <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey" rel="nofollow">http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey</a>