It might be that more Mac users are moving away from Steam as their gaming client - from my experience, it's very glitchy, and hasn't been properly updated in years
And isn't there extremely limited support for M1 Mac on Steam? As Mac users upgrade their machines, they can't continue to use Steam like they used to.
You can use the client just fine. It's just some games that won't work. We'll see what GamePortingToolkit makes in term of difference. Heroic Games Launcher has apparently made it fairly simple to add it on Mac ala Proton. (I haven't had time to dig into it yet, so I'm just going from what I read in updates/release notes)
Right, what I meant for limited support for M1 on Steam was that the library of games on Mac is essentially obsolete. And their toolkit requires intervention from developers in a way that Proton does not, I understand. Which means it costs money to continue supporting your customers who already paid you a long time ago. I don't see the situation improving much.
My own limited testing was actually more positive than expected. The real limiting factor is games that never received a 64 bit update. It turns out that - at least among many of the games I gave a shot - many have received that 64 bit version and run just fine under Rosetta. I think many Mac porting houses / developers just don't rush out in the same way app devs do to support the latest versions, but they tend to get around to it eventually if they still have the rights and are in business. I hope Mac will eventually see a compatibility layer, so games will stay functional while Apple monkeys around with system stuff.
My anecdotal experience is that Apple silicon support is not usually a major problem. Plenty of stuff seems to be fine through Rosetta. The worse case is 32 bit only games which are unsupported in modern macos versions regardless of CPU arch.