Mac Steam client crashes eighty percent less than Windows client

If you’ve ever thought that Mac users aren’t the gaming bunch, you may want to rethink your opinions a little. More importantly, if you’re a game developer who thinks that there’s no market in the Mac world for your games, you’ll also have to rethink your stance a little.

Valve has just reported that Portal has been downloaded 1.5 million times in total and that a large number of the downloads have come through their brand-spanking new Steam client for OS X. If there was ever proof that Apple users are starving for legitimate gaming titles this is the proof in the pudding.

The numbers aren’t completely OS X based results, but we’re willing to bet that large chunk of the downloads came from the Mac community.

Valve’s also announced that two-thirds of the Mac users are running Steam on a laptop, and more than 11% of “purchases” on the Steam Network have come from Mac Users. They don’t specify if the free Portal downloads are being counted in that 11%, but we’re assuming they weren’t. Free doesn’t mean purchases in our books.

Here’s the biggest news out of Valve: the client is one-fifth as likely to crash on a Mac, despite running the same code base as the Windows version. Now that’s music to our ears. Mac users are so used to having ported applications being buggy, that we just assumed we were going to be getting the raw end of the stick. It’s nice to see that our platform of choice isn’t being well represented in bug reports.

I can’t wait to pwn @eastscene at CS:S once it’s released.

Article Via Steam Blog