It’s not the end of the world to develop for macOS and iOS. These platforms are just idiosyncratic and don’t have many serious gamers.
Neither smartphones nor Macs have been powerful or ergonomic enough to play current-generation games for decades. So the user base is almost entirely people who don’t play games.
For a developer, the juice is not worth the squeeze (and by far!). The platforms are challenging to port for and all that effort seems to result in near-zero sales. All ports seem to be almost guaranteed commercial failures.
My key point is that perhaps the platforms are now mature enough to develop for and Metal is alright. But they have not been for a long time and it’s a really bad market to target for a game developer.
Unless Apple funds your games like some other platforms do, it’s better to just blow the porting budget on something that’s at least fun. I haven’t heard of anyone’s game funded by Apple, but maybe it happens? These deals are rarely made public.
I feel like Apple has the opposite attitude of Microsoft's towards 3p apps in general, not just games. Mac updates will constantly break apps at least minor ways, sometimes major (like 32-bit removal).
Microsoft's reluctance to break things comes from commercial entities being a big source of licenses both for desktops and backend servers. If some poorly maintained mission-critical app doesn't run on Windows 11 because it hasn't had a recompile in a decade, that means a Global 2000 company isn't able to update their workforce.
Apple considers it a partnership with developers, even if that partnership in reality is rather one-sided. If you stop maintaining your software you aren't holding up your end of the partnership. For instance, ignoring six years worth of deprecation warnings about 32 bit software going away, or seven years (and running) warnings about OpenGL support, or still shipping only Intel binaries four years after M1 launched.
But this is not how games are supported, except for subscription games like MMOs or crazy edge case labors-of-love like Starcraft. Fixes are going to be driven by a chance at new revenue, like updating to support HiDPI displays properly as part of a major DLC update. Afterthought ports (especially third party ones) like a Windows title to the Mac are even more limited in terms of ongoing support - and are often like-for-like limits to 32 bit intel only because the original developers never tried to write portable code.
Gamers don't need to worry about "how games are supported" as along as they work. You can run many old games in Wine even though original developers stopped supporting them decades ago. Putting hurdles in the way of that is the opposite of supporting though and that's where Apple is causing a problem. This applies to refusal to support Vulkan as well as stuff like gutting 32-bit and OpenGL.
Sometimes it works, but the performance is worse. Like back when I had an Intel Mac, csgo was fine on Boot Camp but had noticeable input lag in macOS, and iirc under Wine it had less input lag but stuttered more. It'd be unplayable if I cared about winning, but I didn't care.
It seems that way. For a long time, what Apple didn’t use or specifically wanted on their platforms didn’t get a lot of thought.
Most game engines haven’t figured out resolutions and DPI scaling for windowed full-screen games in macOS and for a long time, it didn’t seem like there were many guidelines (bare minimum) or support from Apple.
Third party is just not as important as first party to Apple, I think. Which is ironic for a company that has succeeded tremendously off the backs of 3p devs on iOS. But perhaps it’s a different strategy for each product line. And it’s probably been a good strategy to focus on certain areas and not others for them.
It’s not all bad, you can definitely port games to Macs with some effort. If it was only worth it, it would be fantastic.
Though I’ll say, I think there is a niche for casual games with excellent graphics on Macs now. This niche could be worth a lot of money by the end of the decade, just like casual mobile games.
> Unless Apple funds your games like some other platforms do, it’s better to just blow the porting budget on something that’s at least fun. I haven’t heard of anyone’s game funded by Apple, but maybe it happens? These deals are rarely made public.
Maybe I'm wrong but I thought/assumed that Valve's work to get Steam and their GoldSource and Source game engines working on Mac was with some sort of support from Apple - I know they did Linux support around the same time but the extra work to get everything working on a Mac wouldn't have been trivial.
That’s the only avenue I see where porting a AAA-style game makes sense for a Mac financially.
Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, and several Counter-Strike games were also ported, but CS:GO was later discontinued for Macs. These were done without Apple’s money as I understand. And the discontinuation seems related to support costs on a platform that doesn’t have many gamers.
Yeah I think Valve ported their whole catalogue of games, but I'm not sure what exactly happened with the discontinuation - I thought they quietly dropped the Mac support tag from all of their games two or three months ago, probably because Intel Macs haven't been sold in a few years now? Presumably they didn't want to sink more money into Mac support (they had 11 years worth of Mac usage statistics to back up their decision).
> I'm not sure what exactly happened with the discontinuation
They didn't update their old games with 64-bit support, and in February they dropped support for the last macOS with 32-bit support (Mojave) because 98% of Mac Steam users had updated to newer OS releases. Mojave (released in 2018) hasn't received security updates in years, and doesn't support the latest CEF, which the Steam client is based on. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/macos/32-bit-mac-holdo...
I don’t think Intel v. ARM matters too much once the engine HALs support it natively, or through Rosetta 2. This to me doesn’t seem too bad.
The OS APIs and building an ergonomic experience is the challenging part. Supporting APIs is harder than it may seem. That’s graphics, sound, task scheduling and multi threading, I/O for both files and devices, and many more. All these things have different approaches on different OSes, as well as different limits of what is allowed and what is not. Different best practices and degrees of documentation, too. This all then needs to make for a good player experience and meet gamer expectations. It’s a Herculean task.
It is even harder, because many graphics APIs, for example, support different features. So either your artists must accommodate and create several versions of skeletal meshes, visual effects, and similar; or your engineers must develop new graphics technologies to compensate automatically. And if that didn’t seem hard enough, try recruiting from a pool of game graphics programmers for macOS without a hot six figures a year burning a hole in your pocket. Now consider this for other APIs, though they are often more standard and less challenging.
I could be wrong, but many corners are cut for platforms that don’t have that many players — you just can’t justify the costs it would take to do an excellent port. And that creates pretty deep and difficult to patch issues. The same is seen on games ported to Linux.
While this seems counterintuitive Mac makes it very convoluted to release on their platform. To the point that the low sales really don't justify. Here's a video from a game dev driving this home
This is what I meant, in part, by saying how idiosyncratic the platform is. There are many more ways it is so.
I am very happy someone put the sales figures out there in the public. Not everyone can afford to if they must keep a professional relationship with Apple.
<100 sales for Mac like this guy claims are realistic numbers.
> Neither smartphones nor Macs have been powerful or ergonomic enough to play current-generation games for decades. So the user base is almost entirely people who don’t play games.
Current Macs and iOS devices are powerful enough. There's a handful of developers shipping full current-gen games to both platforms.
> It’s not the end of the world to develop for macOS and iOS. These platforms are just idiosyncratic and don’t have many serious gamers.
That could change if Apple and Valve would team up and make proton-like stuff happen (GamePortingToolkit is a first, but half-assed step). I own a MacMini M2 base model (retailed at 630€ new) for work and was surprised how well games last-gen games run on it (either Rosetta2 or GPTK+wine). With better software compatibility I could see the upcoming M4 mac mini as a serious game console contender. Smaller form factor and more silent than any console, add an Xbox/DualSense controller in the living room and you are good to go.
Point is that Apple is deliberately blocking Vulkan support. Which prevents things like Wine / Proton from offering decent performance for games there (MoltenVK is not really adequate for that).
Being it's Apple, not some kind of poor entity who can claim lack of resources, I'd say they very much on purpose disregard gaming as a use case and therefore it's a strong reason to stay away from Apple to begin with if you do care about it as a user (gamer).
> I'd say they very much on purpose disregard gaming as a use case
Considering they made Metal, and the Game Porting Toolkit, and Game Center, and specific tabs for games in the App Stores, and Apple Arcade, and added native support for game controllers, and have dedicated sections of their keynotes to gaming, it is pretty clear they don’t disregard gaming as a use case. Tim Cook’s Apple is bad in a lot of ways, but it isn’t that stupid to ignore that lucrative of a market which fell on their lap.
What you mean is they’re not embracing gaming the way you want. Which is fine to complain about, I also would prefer a different approach, but saying they’re purposely disregarding gaming does not align with reality.
> What you mean is they’re not embracing gaming the way you want
Yes. And I consider it disregarding when it comes to the needs of gamers (or users in general really). Apple's approach is always shoving in their users' faces "that's the way to do it". As I said, it's a major reason to completely stay away from them.
Many games that work in Wine work just fine in GamePortingToolKit (which is just an Apple-written patch on top of CrossOver which is just more patches on top of Wine)
Unlike Linux, Windows and etc. I don't think even GPU makers can provide their own implementation of Vulkan there - only Apple can do that. And they refuse. So it can be considered a deliberate blocking.
I personally believe, considering their track record, it’s more likely they simply don’t care about it.
More experienced macOS and iOS developers will probably be able to confirm that Apple basically only invests efforts in what Apple wants, whatever that is, and nothing else.
Neither smartphones nor Macs have been powerful or ergonomic enough to play current-generation games for decades. So the user base is almost entirely people who don’t play games.
For a developer, the juice is not worth the squeeze (and by far!). The platforms are challenging to port for and all that effort seems to result in near-zero sales. All ports seem to be almost guaranteed commercial failures.
My key point is that perhaps the platforms are now mature enough to develop for and Metal is alright. But they have not been for a long time and it’s a really bad market to target for a game developer.
Unless Apple funds your games like some other platforms do, it’s better to just blow the porting budget on something that’s at least fun. I haven’t heard of anyone’s game funded by Apple, but maybe it happens? These deals are rarely made public.
Chicken and the egg.
Just my opinion.