Apple users go gaming mad with Steam

The latest hardware survey of Steam users has revealed that Mac-heads accounted for some 8.46 per cent of all Steam users during the month of May 2010.

These users were running games from the Valve online service using Mac OS X 10.6.3, Mac OS X 10.6 or Mac OS X 10.5.8.

Steam for Mac only tipped up halfway through the month and it looks like game-starved Apple fans have bee flocking to see what PC users have been banging on about for years.

Still ruling the roost as far as Steam's gamers are concerned, however, is the 32-bit version of Windows XP, which notched up 32.89 per cent of users. A notable 24.77 per cent of users were running Windows 7 64 bit, a miserable 14.66 per cent were running 32-bit Windows Vista while 11.15 per cent of users were sticking to 32-bit Windows 7.

Valve's digital game distribution platform boasts more than 25 million users world wide and offers access to some 1,100 PC. After its introduction in May, Valve has said it will pu the Mac platform on equal footing with the PC, so that new major titles developed for the PC will be released for the Mac at the same time.

The company has also made its Steamworks suite of publishing and development tools available on the Mac platform, including product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking and anti-cheat technology.