Linux is strategically important for Valve to maintain a credible alternative to Microsoft. Note they don't even have to necessarily ever "pull the trigger" to force Microsoft to make sure they don't lock them out, simply having the credible option to do so is sufficient to achieve their business goals.
And having picked up a Steam Deck about a year ago now, going into it with the expectation that it would run maybe half my games and tending away from the AAA releases, I can say they have a very credible option. Valve can run almost everything without Microsoft now. Pretty much everything I have runs on my Deck just fine, since I don't do the multiplayer games that have aggressive anticheat on them. I almost don't even think about compatibility any more because it's just there, for what I do. This has spilled over to my Linux desktop, too; I switched it due to having my fill of Microsoft's belief they own my system, own my users, and can do whatever they like with them, and if that cut off all gaming it would have been fine with me, but in reality the spillover of Valve's efforts is that it works just fine.
Apple has chosen to make themselves strategically unimportant to Valve by making it probably even more difficult to support them well than to just give up and submit to Microsoft entirely. They could have played this role but have chosen not to, because in their world, this is relatively minor compared to what they want out of their platform.
So even if the user count is roughly the same, Valve is going to support Linux much more, and is pushing it harder.
Linux adoption is 100% incidental to to Valve investing in their own platform, which happens to be built on Linux. It has little to do with the technical merit of the platform where games end up. BSD isn't one of the biggest gaming operating systems because it's so great for games, it's because Sony needed an OS more free than Linux for their console.
> Linux adoption is 100% incidental to to Valve investing in their own platform, which happens to be built on Linux.
I'm not sure if you realized it but you are arguing the same point many others have been in this post. Apple is not investing in gaming, especially relative to their market cap compared to valve. Valve is making gaming on linux a reality because they are investing in it.
Apple has the money, they don't have the motivation to make it happen, because they don't want to participate on an open platform. That would be counter-productive to their goals of a walled garden.
If you buy into Apple, you cannot leave their walled garden and that's by design, with no plans on changing.
Especially DX12 giving so much more control has actually backfired in a lot of instances, because game developers don't treat PCs with the same optimization care as they do consoles. Consoles have standards (and reject bad builds), for PC you can always pull a Todd Howard and tell users to upgrade to compensate for their misuse of the APIs.
Windows has traction by market saturation, not the technical merit of their Graphics API.
It's merit is utterly irrelevant. It's good enough, and good enough with other avenues of investment win over "the greatest thing of all time" every single time.
Because the games are there. In large part because Valve is making it happen.
> Apple's indifferent (if not hostile) attitude towards gaming
They’ve been touting the abilities of Apple Silicon for gaming on their events. Their platforms support modern gaming controllers with zero setup. They had Hideo Kojima (and others) at WWDC. There are two separate sections on the App Stores just for games. They developed multiple technologies specifically for games: https://developer.apple.com/games/
We can argue if Apple’s gaming strategy is any good, but calling them indifferent or hostile to games does not align with reality.
At the end of the day, there is a path to switch from Windows to Linux for gaming (both playing and development) without requiring an investment in hardware. Switching to Apple for gaming effectively requires investing in new (at least to the user) hardware.
That's a pretty huge difference, and things like the yearly fees (even if they aren't expensive in practice) only make the switch less attractive.
No one wants to have to switch platforms to do one specific thing, we’d all prefer for the things we want to be available in the platforms we want to use. If you like Windows, you’re not going to switch to Linux for gaming. What the growing number of Linux games allows is for Linux people to not have to switch to something else. In the same way, the people who want to play games on macOS are the same ones who already use the platform.
But having proprietary APIs on Macs isn't going to get other desktop games to Apple, when Macs aren't nearly as numerous as people would like to believe.
Couldn't Apple do the same? Why isn't it working? You don't realize it but you are proving the counter-argument many are making. Apple refuses to contribute to an open platform for gaming, so they have to rely on converting game developers to work within their walled garden.
What are you talking about, you think linux came and courted gabe? NO! It's a free platform they can build upon and make it their own, so they did it. No one is going to pull the rug out from under them.
Also apple is fucking swimming in games, I'm willing to bet more gaming is done on ios than windows. It's just not games that represent 'the gamer'. No modern warfare 5000 on ios. I know that most days, even as I could be identified as 'a gamer' for the last 30-40 years, I spend more times playing games on my phone than I do on consoles or my pc. Part of that is just 'I always have my iphone' part of it is the games are often designed around short session length, part of that is most AAA game releases these days are wildly uninspired. Every once and awhile I can black-out a whole sunday just to soak in a big release (I imagine spiderman will eat a day or two whole in a few weeks, I know Baldurs Gate ate more than a few sundays since it was released)
It's sad not to see many games on macos, though the ones we get are generally ones I want. Aforementioned baldurs gate 3, mid tier 'indies' that are frankly amazing like Hades and Slay the Spire. I could care less if assassins creed 326 makes it to macos, or mordern warfare 754: even more jingoism. It hurt a little to see blizzard abandon macos with diablo 4 .. then I played it and well ... not so hurt anymore.
"Few users" also describes Linux, but Linux (gaming) usershare is growing and recently passed MacOS usershare (as measured by Steam).
I would argue that Apple's indifferent (if not hostile) attitude towards gaming has driven away many game developers.