That's because Steam barely works on modern macs. After they killed 32 bit support, most of my games stopped working. Even at the best of times, only a fraction of the games worked on mac. And now with essentially all macs running arm processors, the only macs left running steam are from last decade. So all these surveys prove is that a market that they barely supported wasn't very large.
And you forget that one of the largest gaming platforms out there is the iphone. Which also doesn't show up in the steam hardware survey because steam doesn't run on it. The iphone market proves that there is a gaming market for typical Apple users. A very big market even. People that spend a lot of money on their phone also seem to like spending a lot of money in the app store. And mostly on games. Apple rakes in billions via the app store.
If Steam were to get Mac support to the same level it is on Linux, most of the games would start working and there are a shitload of Apple PCs and laptops out there that would be able to run that.
People who play phone games wont convert to playing desktop games. My mother-in-law has spent untold amounts of money on candy crush, on her iPhone, has a 10 year old windows desktop and talks shit about her daughter playing videogames games from time to time. If you've got some data saying the correlation is very high, alright. But I don't believe it is.
Also, where is Apple's responsibility in all this? Steam this, Steam that. Apple changes arch, doesn't support vulkan and removes 32-bit support and then it's Steam's job to chase Apple? EA, Ubisoft, CD Project, Epic and Actiblizzard all also have store fronts and don't care to support mac. They could all be asleep behind the wheel, true. Or it could be that Apple makes it too annoying to support a platform that would barely yield any sales.
If Steam, a tiny company in comparison, and Codeweavers, also an tiny company in comparison, can get games to run on Proton+Linux then I'm pretty sure that Apple, with a little help from their trillion dollars, can manage something. But they also don't care cause Steam wont give 30%, which is Steam's fault of course.
And you forget that one of the largest gaming platforms out there is the iphone. Which also doesn't show up in the steam hardware survey because steam doesn't run on it. The iphone market proves that there is a gaming market for typical Apple users. A very big market even. People that spend a lot of money on their phone also seem to like spending a lot of money in the app store. And mostly on games. Apple rakes in billions via the app store.
If Steam were to get Mac support to the same level it is on Linux, most of the games would start working and there are a shitload of Apple PCs and laptops out there that would be able to run that.