Apple is justified doing whatever they want. I even agree with apple's stand that traditional gaming market doesn't matter to them. But from the traditional developers' perspective, Apple system is hostile and they have no reason to develop for Apple. Valve go out of their way to develop proton which is based on vulkan. Apple could utilize it if they have supported vulkan. Valve actively expand the linux support for old and current games. Apple has to work for it to court the traditional developers. Superior hardware doesn't mean much when the alternatives are good enough
And it's justified, because it's really not that important in money making in grand scheme of things.
Apple hardware has a lot more capability than their software allows you to use. If Apple was interested in growing their market share further, there are a lot of gains are to be had in supporting non Apple software platforms on Apple hardware. Linux is an obvious one because of Asahi Linux. They've done a lot of the hard work already despite Apple not lifting a finger. Imagine how well that could work with a little Apple support. Even just unofficially. Share a bit of documentation, toss in a few developer resources, etc. Not that hard.
Making sure their CPU/GPUs work perfectly with e.g. Steam and making sure that game studios are able to target Apple hardware would make a lot of difference for their appeal to gamers. Steam, of course, is also starting to work in Asahi Linux as well. There is really no good technical reason why that couldn't work on Mac OS natively.
Of course the same reason that this is a good idea also means Apple won't do it because they seem to prefer controlling their software ecosystem at the cost of failing to grow it. So Metal is nice but completely useless for gaming, or indeed most consumer focused use cases involving 3D (except for the Apple sanctioned ones). OpenCL/OpenGL barely work at this point. Forget about vulkan or directx. The whole AR/VR thing is perpetually not happening at all on Apple hardware. Until such time that they choose to release some Apple branded hardware for this of course. They are also not really investing in making their AI optimized hardware work for mainstream AI developers. Etc.
Anyway, Apple could make a really nice gaming focused console based on e.g. the mac mini. Not that hard. It would not require a lot of changes. Basically beef up the Apple TV UI, make sure games actually can be ported to it, and job done. Not that hard. But as long as their OS is locked down and developer hostile, none of that will happen.
I still don't understand the conflict of interest. Valve is closer to pushbutton game compatibility than Apple, their translation kits are both based on DXVK and they both use tons of Codeweavers code. In a lot of ways, they're retreading the same path with zero tangible benefit to the user.
Obviously Game Porting Toolkit is not meant to be a crutch, but it's clear there's demand for games to work on Apple hardware. As a user, why are you opposed to having more options alongside Apple's more restricted, curated offerings?
Steam invested heavily in Proton due to competitive threat of a future (consumer) windows where applications can only be installed from the windows store. (and for their own nascent hardware business)
Apple doesn't have any incentive for gaming on macOS. They already make a large amount of gaming revenue from the app store. Gamers on macos would likely buy from steam anyway. And they aren't going to sell many more macs just because the gaming support is a little better.
Because game developers despise Apple. The only major devs who gave a damn about Mac support was Blizzard, and even then they didn't really care about porting anything other than World of Warcraft to Apple Silicon (or even Mac altogether). Valve tried extending an olive branch a few years ago with Steam Proton support on Mac, but Apple batted it away, and Valve responded by pulling SteamVR support for Mac. The rest of the AAA gaming space absolutely will not care until Vulkan is natively supported on Apple hardware, because there's no way they're going to put their games on it otherwise. Without Vulkan, you're not just missing out on Vulkan titles (of which there are many), but also DirectX ones that would be playable at near-native framerates through translation tech like DXVK. The fact that Apple doesn't have a robust, high-performance graphics API is completely gimping their chances at getting game developers to care, which is why completely broken platforms like Linux and BSD somehow have better game support on hardware that's a fraction of the price.
Oh, and there's the fact that the console space is a low-margin industry where their competitors are taking a loss on their product. The PS5 and both new Xboxes are being sold below-cost just to move units, with the expectation that users will pay for digital purchases/subscriptions to compensate. The Nintendo Switch is barely staying underneath $300, to the point that it normally sells at a loss during the holidays just because of shipping prices. Apple is known to drive massive hardware margins, so making a product that's actually worth it's value isn't all that attractive to them. They'd rather have their cake and eat it too, which has worked pretty good for their insane 30% margin they cut off nearly every microtransaction they see. The less attention they draw to that fact, the better.
On M1 support. Apple been actively hostile to game developers. Apple has not maintained OpenGL support well, dropped 32-bit binaries, have no Vulkan support and break their APIs and compatibility all the time. No surprise Valve is not enthusiastic about supporting their platform.
I mean, Apple's refusal to license their OS for non-Apple hardware is unambiguously the correct decision. From Apple's perspective there are countless downsides and zero upsides to doing otherwise.
Apple is going to be huge in gaming in the mid-term future. If you have a limited, controlled hardware range, developers can tune Apple-targeted games in the same way that they tune console games. They can guarantee that everything works exactly as intended, which has been the achilles' heel of PC gaming since time immemorial.
I grew up a hardcore gamer and vehement apple-hater, but over the past decade, Apple has become the most competent consumer hardware company on earth and I'm super excited for the future here.
Valve had no problem porting thousands of games to Steam Deck without paying developers a dime. It is a proven fact that a functional DXVK/Wine runtime can support more AAA video games than whatever Apple is paying for.
You keep bringing this around to revenue, but Apple could solve this problem if they didn't benefit from the status quo. A company 10x smaller than them did it, a company with full control over their hardware stack has no excuse to drag their feet and copy Open Source's homework.
It's all a bit moot. Gaming is an ecosystem, and MacOS is not a big part of it. Even if Apple supported all the things it needed to, developers still wouldn't build for it, it's too small a segment.
Apple also has no buy in for the segment of gaming people wish it supported. Where SteamOS and Windows both have first party AAA game development studios.
I think that's a mistaken way of viewing it. Apple's failure in the gaming space is entirely a matter of policy; you look over at the Steam Deck and Valve is running Microsoft IP without paying for their runtime. Some people really do get their cake and eat it too.
Any of the aforementioned libraries could make their camera smarter or improve Siri/OCR marginally. The fact that Apple wasted their time reinventing the wheel is what bothers me, they're making a mistake by assuming that their internal library will inherently appeal to developers and compete with the SOTA.
The reason why I criticize them is because I legitimately believe Apple is one of the few companies capable of shipping hardware that competes with Nvidia. Apple is their only competitor at TSMC, it's entirely a battle of engineering wits between the two of them right now. Apple is going nowhere fast with CoreML and Accelerate framework, but they could absolutely cut Nvidia off at the pass by investing in the unified infrastructure that Intel and AMD refuse to. It also wouldn't harm the customer experience, leverages third-party contributions to advance their progress, and frees up resources to work on more important things. Just sayin'.
Apples gaming revenue is not on AAA gaming or dedicated gamers. It in micro transaction mobile games that rake in absolute fortunes. Those kind of games don't care what the graphics API is as they are mostly 2d anyway.
Apple is clearly doing extremely well for themselves and I'm not claiming it's a mistake on their part. But as a user who enjoys playing games, MacOS is by far the worst system for it. Linux is leagues ahead now due to proton and Vulkan.
The hardware is powerful enough for some gaming on macos but nothing supports it. I can get CSGO and RuneScape running reasonably well but those are almost certainly on OpenGL and not Molten.
I think the only significant Molten support has been in the pro video / 3D space.
I don’t follow that Apple doesn’t want people to play games on Macs. Of course they do. But the question becomes “Do developers want to make games for the Mac?” And the answer has been “no” most of the time because it’s expensive to develop for a small platform. You won’t get a lot of sales out of it.
Apple just recently released a porting toolkit to make it easier to get Windows games running on macOS. Frankly, not unlike the work that Valve has put in to running Windows games on Steam.
In typical Apple fashion, they want you to do things their way. Instead of bolstering OpenGL (for instance) or Vulkan they developed Metal.
Apple does want games on the Mac, but games are a bonus for Apple at this point. They’re not going to define the platform, or drive adoption.
Right, which is why I'd rather Apple accept that their heart isn't really in the PC games business and work to enable Valve or others to handle that experience.
My point was Apple could do it themselves, but they haven't, they almost certainly won't, and even if they did I don't think their heart is really in it to do it properly.
- People shouldn't buy Apple hardware for the games, but there's clearly an audience of Apple users (that have these devices for _other_ reasons) for a lot of games, so supporting it should be an easy win. Source 2 already had a Metal build (via Dota 2). Valve cut away a confirmed audience larger than Steam Deck owners.
- Don't get hung up on "the M1". Apple's higher end models scale quite well, the Pro is very common and the Max, while mostly a bad investment solely for games, would scale well if there were games to run on it.
The problem is apple actively working against the game developers, or they just ignore the market completely. See the example of vulkan, and deprecation of 32bit games. It doesn't matter how good the hardware is. If the platform is not supporting the games and all they have are the occasional courting of the some of the games, the games won't come to the apple platform for free.
Also they are already making the mobile gaming money which is already lucrative. Are they also committing enough to the 'conventional' gaming?
I think you're missing the spirit of the question. If Apple doesn't want to wreck gaming on its platform, and if there are few gamers on Apple platforms, and supporting Apple platforms doesn't give Valve the upper hand against MS the same way supporting Linux would... Why would Valve bother? Why shouldn't it be on Apple to make it work?
Maybe install Crossover and play the Windows versions of games through there?
I am now having a brief fantasy of a world where Apple pulls Proton into the OS as a Windows emulation layer for games and starts pushing their changes upstream just like Valve does.
I can think of many reasons why it would never happen but it sure would be nice. Not that I haven't been voting against Mac games with my wallet for years, I've had a Mac to get shit done with and a rotating set of consoles to play games on since about 2000, and very occasionally bought a point-and-click adventure for the Mac.
But Valve should be the one making Proton compatible with Macs.
Why is the onus on the smaller company to make games compatible with Mac and not, say, the world's biggest tech company?
Macs are largely incompatible with gaming because of Apple's decisions. And Apple customers who are into gaming usually dual-boot into Windows to game, because Windows is (and for several decades, has been) the superior OS for gaming.
Why would the vision pro have games? I'm still waiting for the damn iPhone to be the gaming platform they promised over a decade ago. I watched over the last few years as Mac computers somehow got more powerful than they ever were but also have lost just about all support for modern games. The truth is, despite what apple says out of their mouth at their pressers, they don't really care about gaming or have any interest in establishing a viable development environment for this platform. Valve isn't even porting their games to mac anymore despite how much fanfare the relationship with this company and apple had for years.
And it's justified, because it's really not that important in money making in grand scheme of things.
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