>All they'll accomplish is further killing off the already-small presence they have in the gaming space.
In the AAA game space you mean. Else, in the casual gaming space, iOS is perhaps the most popular platform -- and the new integration effort means all those games will be able to run on macOS as well soon.
And those games are horrible. Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted. The biggest difference between those games and gambling is that you don't carry a slot machine in your pocket. For the most part the only exceptions to that are the games that were ported from desktop.
They work fine for me -- both as implementation and as gameplay.
>Almost all of them are built around exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche to convince people to spend money and become addicted.
I think you confused casual gaming with Zynga or something. I was referring to smaller, non-AAA megatitles. Could be anything from a platform game, to Angry Birds, Monument Valley, Threes, Letterpress, racing games, RPGs and so on...
I'm not saying there aren't decent games on iOS. You can find gems like Monument Valley, Florence, or, as I mentioned, the games ported from other platforms like Limbo, Terraria, and so on. But take a look at the top charts on the iOS app store and compare that to the top games on Steam. With few exceptions, the games on iOS are riddled with ads, microtransactions, and are designed to be as addictive as possible.
The point is that the kind of games that thrive on the app store tend to be exploitative and low quality. Desktop gaming isn't immune from that, but it's a dramatically better platform.
Not if Microsoft has any say. I can't count the number of Windows Updates that re-installed the previously uninstalled Candy Crush Saga, Bubble Witch 3 Saga and March of Empires (among titles).
I played the fuck out of Angry Birds - on Android. How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone? That was a rhetorical question BTW, don't even try to answer it. Apple are being arrogant as fuck with this.
>How exactly does forcing developers to adopt a platform specific API help anyone?
Well, platform specific APIs aren't lowest-common-denominator affairs, and get support for native platform capabilities faster (plus can be more optimized).
You talk of a subset. A lot of casual games on iOS a very good: Cut the rope, Angry Birds, Bad Piggies, Simple Rockets. Civilization for iPad was very good. I can't remember all the stuff I've played but a lot of games are not the candy crush kind.
Also a lot went wrong when Apple opened up for ads and in game purchases.
PUBG Mobile is one of the best game I have played in a long time. And it doesn't cost me a penny. Nor do I have to pay to win. ( Actually I may have to upgrade my phone to play better )
But not every game are gambling. Fortnite seems to be doing great. And that shouldn't be a pay to win game.
PUBG was ported from desktop. It originally started out as an ARMA 2 mod, was turned into PUBG, and only much later ported over to mobile. It's a perfect example of the kind of game that can come out of the desktop gaming community. You don't get games like PUBG, Minecraft, Starcraft, Terraria, Civ, Kerbal, and so on without desktop gaming.
The games that grow out of the app store ecosystem are games like Candy Crush, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. I'm not saying good games don't exist on the platform, I'm saying the platform is conducive to low quality games. Almost all of the great games on the app store did not grow out of the platform.
That I certainly agree. But I do think the future are Games built on top of Game engine. Unreal seems to have a massive improvement changelog every 6 months and if Unity didn't exist I did doubt how anyone is going to compete within a reasonable budget.
Game Engine Choices would become the old day of OpenGL vs DirectX. No one sane would write their own game from scratch.
I don't expect there will ever be an AAA game presence on macOS at this point, given so few of their machines offer dedicated GPUs anymore.
And even in cases where they are available, for example Macbook Pros, the cost difference involved in stepping up from an integrated GPU to an entry-level dedicated card is greater than the cost of buying an Xbox or PlayStation.
Additionally, I don't think indie developers have loads of time on their hands to port their niche games over to a new technology. I can see Unity supporting Metal, but smaller platforms (jMonkeyEngine) will have a slower adoption rate, and in that time hopefully open-source middleware will come out to handle legacy APIs.
In the AAA game space you mean. Else, in the casual gaming space, iOS is perhaps the most popular platform -- and the new integration effort means all those games will be able to run on macOS as well soon.